


Blood Noir Bone

by PurpleMoon3



Series: Executioner Dresden [4]
Category: Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter - Laurell K. Hamilton, Gabriel Knight (Video Games), Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, The Dresden Files - All Media Types, The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: But he knows how to get out, Case Fic, F/M, Harry doesn't know how he gets into these things, Harry-as-Anita, Herr Knight is not appearing in this fic., Homesickness, Vampires are dicks, Vampires are victims, world building
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-02-24 15:11:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 7
Words: 37,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13216416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PurpleMoon3/pseuds/PurpleMoon3
Summary: Harry's consultation gig is going rather well: with vampire and lycan rights movements being a thing more people are open to the idea of hiring a wizard.  Executioner.  Person thing.But it seems the more things change, the more they stay the same, and Harry gets a call that takes him back to his old stomping grounds.  Chicago.





	1. House Calls

**Author's Note:**

> **AUTHOR'S NOTE: PLEASE READ!**
> 
>  
> 
> This installment is intended to be rather different than the pervious fics. It is going to mention some rather heavy subjects, see archive warnings, but I wasn't sure how to tag without spoiling the plot right out. While forced prostitution and rape occur depressingly often in the source material, it usually only happens between adults. If child prostitution is a trigger, stop reading now and come back for _Obsidian Knight_. 
> 
> Thank You,  
> PurpleMoon3

Growing up, my education could generously be called ecelectic. I was homeschooled. First by my dad, as the life of a traveling magician did not lend itself to staying in one place long enough for enrollment, and then by Justin Motherfucker DuMourne. There was a brief stint between the two where I had been a ward of the state, but I had just lost my father and that kind of temperment saw me bounced around as many foster homes as public schools. Justin pulled me out of that situation shortly after my magic manifested, to this day I still don't know how he found me, and his areas of focus were less rounded than most.

If it couldn't be applied to magic, he didn't waste time on it.

Years later, despite his many good qualities, Wizard McCoy did not manage to fill in those gaps. My mentor had been more concerned with saving my neck and sanity, trimming back those teachings of Justin's that would have sent me tripping ignorantly into the black. Eb had been good to me. He'd saved my life, my soul, and taught me to remember the _magic_ in magic and not simply a tool for power.

Sadly, once I'd left the farm I quickly realized just how lacking my knowledge base was when it came to the greater world. I'd spent months traveling around, getting my bearings, sleeping in ye olde battlehardened beetle and doing odd jobs to put food in my stomach and gas in the tank until I'd managed to sort out the paperwork necessary to get a GED. With it, though, I then realized that what I knew best and what made me happy was _wizardry_.

But, stole or no stole, the mortal world doesn't exactly accept White Council certification as far as businesses go, so with PI license in hand I hung my sign and crossed my fingers. The thing is, though, when you advertise as a wizard you don't get the sort of clients that would look good on a resume. I feilded a lot of crazies, a lot of threats, and on one memorable occasion a man that thought wizard was some secret code for gay sex hookup. Experince, hands down, had been my best teacher and the one to eat the expense of revising my yellow pages advert to include: no love potions, endless purses, or other entertainment.

 _Other entertainment_ covered _a lot_ of bases, from birthday parties to bacholorettes, and while I didn't mind the kids so much... the less said about me and body glitter, the better.

Suffice it to say, barring a case of haunted garden gnomes or pixie pranks very few clients have asked me to come to their very nice house in the middle of suburbia. Just another one of the many differences between living in a world where colleges taught courses in demonology and metaphyics alongside science and engineering, and a world where most mundanes preferred the three monkey approach to the supernatural.

I felt a little like an intruder as I sat on the Smith's couch waiting for Amber's husand to get home. We'd had an appointment, I was following up after doing a little research into their problem on my own end, but something had come up at the office and Joseph was running late. I perched on the edge of a leather loveseat, rotating the sweaty can of coke in my hands, trying to look relaxed. I was a _wizard_. Being wise and all knowing was kinda our shtick.

I don't think Ebenezer ever got called on to provide reproductive advice to married couple, but first time for everything, right?

“He should be home any minute,” Amber Smith assured me as she walked in from the kitchen. Joseph was a lucky man. His wife had the kind of legs that inspired noir novellas, and was wearing a pair of faded blue jeans that had to have been painted on. I pressed the coke can between my palms, rolling it between them, and flicked my gaze away from my client's before I could see anything more than the blue of her eyes. “Can I get you anything else? A snack, maybe? Ice?”

From our first phone conference, I'd gotten the impression that Amber was the sort of woman who was meant to be a mother. A legacy of four miscarriages, only one of which made it to the second trimester, had prevented her from fullfilling that role. Instead, the regina of the St. Louis werelions had chanelled those nuturing instincts into her pride. But she wanted more. She wanted a child of her own to raise, and it wasn't like any of the adoption agencies were going to approve of the Smiths if and when their status as shapeshifters came to light.

The supernatural in general may be an accepted facet of the status quo in this brave new world, but on an individual basis it was safer for many to remain the monster in the closet.

“I'm good, but thanks.” I moved to place my drink on the coffee table and paused, arm outstreatched. The blonde's shoulders had squared, not unlike Mister's would before pouncing on my feet. Feeling like an uncouth idiot, I reached for the crochet coasters stacked in the center of the table and slid one under my coke can. The hackles subsided. I continued: “I've actually got another appointment this evening, if you wouldn't mind starting...?”

Amber took a seat on an oversized ottoman and gave herself a half-hug. With one hand supporting her elbow she used the other to fiddle with the silver seeming cross dangling from her ear. It wasn't actual silver, but from a distance the stainless steel was indistinguisable from stearling.

“I'm so sorry, Miss Dresden. We _do_ appreciate your coming-” Her head snapped toward the living room window, and a relieved smile broke over her face like the sun peeking from behind clouds. “ _-finally._ ”

Amber hopped up from the ottoman and disappeared down the hall. I tapped my fingers against my knee as the jingling of keys and creak of hinges let me know the front door was opening, and that the man of the house had returned. Joseph Smith was everything his wife was not. He stepped into the living room, still shrugging off his coat as his wife chivvyed him along, and offered me an apology along with his hand.

We shook, and the lack of power play was refreshing. The lion king, and I could never say that aloud with a straight face, manuvered himself onto the couch cushion next to me. “Amber said you had something, for our... infertility?”

I nodded. The lack of conception wasn't their problem. His wife folded herself into Joseph's side and slipped her hand in his. With three of us on the loveseat it was a tight fit, but I sleapt in a kitty pile at home, and Mr. Smith kept more than enough room for jesus between the himself and me.

“As far as I can determine,” I started, mindful of the additional ears in the house. “You and your wife are perfectly healthy werelions. I've consulted with some experts-” Cherry, and a local weretiger that my next appointment had directed me to, “-and the issue lies in your transformations. No matter how you slice it the act of taking on your leones forms is extremely violent. _Birth is violent._ Still, the cluster of cells that make up the embryo are tough. Early on they survive the transformations, but as the developing fetus gets larger and grows more complex the animal form sees it as foreign. It happens sometimes, even in purely human pregnancies, where the immune response triggers to attack the fetus. And this is assuming the trauma from having the uterine walls reshaped and replaced didn't dislodge the placental sac.”

Amber's expression slowly melted from cautious hope to a placid blankness as I spoke. I felt like an ass. Joseph's grip on his wife's hand was knuckle white. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I swallowed, and charged for the light at the end of the tunnel, spreading my hands as I did so.

“But that doesn't mean therianthropes _can't_ have children. It's just more complicated. The local cobra clan managed it. Inherited shifting abilities have been documented, not well, but it has been done.

“Mrs. Smith, Amber, if we can keep you from changing on the full moon you can have your baby. It's just that simple.”

Amber didn't say anything, but her eyes closed and she slumped. Joseph reached over and carded his fingers through her hair. He sighed. “We thought shifting had something to do with it. We prayed, I thought that since some alphas can call to the inner beast and force a change in others maybe the reverse is true, but, if it is... I'm not strong enough.”

“I'm not a shapeshifter.” I said, shaking my head. “I may be Nimir-Ra, but I wouldn't be able to use Richard's methods if I wanted. I'm a wizard, you _hired_ a wizard. Rituals, spells – I got you covered. A shapeshifter's beast comes from the Nevernever, the realm of spirits, so we need to set up a circle to contain that. Fair warning though, ritual components can get expensive.”

I'd considered the Smith's problem from several angles. In the end, it seemed the best thing to do was create a binding circle that could contain a spirit. If it were just me, and just a one time thing, I could set up the necessary circle with a little time, blood, and a bundle of sticks. However; it couldn't be guaranteed that I would be on hand every night Amber's beast would need to be forced down, and truthfully I didn't _want_ to be.

But I'd seen an example of a circle that could contain a transformed beserker spirit before. Granted, that circle had been destroyed by a group of rouge FBI agents, but had it been functional even the weakest hedgewitch would have been able to hold a greater demon. Back then I'd thought I, in all my wizardly wisdom, knew better than to tempt a young practioner with knowledge that could all too easily be used for darker purposes. That could get her killed if it wasn't done just right, or even if it _was_ , depending on what was kept in the circle and who heard about it.

Ten years ago, I was an idiot. Ten years from now I'll probably look back on this moment and think that I am _still_ an idiot. But because I refused to be the mentor _my_ student needed, to give the guidence I promised her, Kim died trying to do the right thing.

“Money doesn't matter.” Amber stated, uncurling from her husband and sinking to the floor while pressing her hands to her stomach. Her womb. “Whatever you want, we can pay it. Maybe, maybe not all at once, but we can.”

I wasn't going to make to make the same mistake twice. I shifted my weight, reaching into my back pocket, and pulled out the blueprint of the containment circle I'd drawn up. I joined Amber on the floor and spread my sketch out on the coffee table. Joseph leaned forward, elbows on knees, examining the paper.

I tried to explain the different levels of the circle, the interlaced runes and jewels that would serve as keystones, but most of it went over the pair's heads. Neither werelion had the base to understand the higher concepts, but some symbolism was universal. I looked up to see Joseph tapping a stylized golden fish against his mouth, the simple necklace pulled from neck to wrap around his fists as he stared at the admittedly occult design on his table.

It wasn't devil worship, I'd fought too many demons to think them worthy of anything but a boot to the balls, but that rarely mattered to the layman.

Joseph Smith pressed his lips together, muttered something about floods and boats, and turned his attention to me. I stared at the spot between and above his eyes, where David would have struck Goliath with the riverstone, and wondered if this was where I got kicked out of the house for being a heathen.

“Would the garage work? Breaking up the cement wouldn't be difficult at all, wouldn't draw much attention if we sectioned off some space and told anyone who asked that we were installing a gameroom...” The Rex questioned, thinking aloud.

“Probably.” I answered with a shrug. I had hoped there was a basement, but a garage would work so long as we could be sure the ground was level and the circle properly installed. I mentioned this, and also how the mindset of whoever was laying the new concrete and setting the circles and runes played key factors. I couldn't guarantee the effectiveness of any random contractor – if they didn't have some measure of talent, even if they believed the runes and gems would do what I said they would do, the containment circle would be little more than a stupidly expensive floor decoration.

Amber suggested we check out the prospective space, I was thinking about how well the sound proofing in the garage was if things went to shit, when a younger woman I'd seen when I'd first driven up poked her pink haired head in. “I'm, uh, sorry to interrupt, but do any of you know a Harry? Some girl is saying it's an emergency.”

“That's me. I'm Harry. Harriet Dresden.” I blinked and braced my hands against the couch cushion, pushing myself off the floor with a grunt. Purposefully, as I left I ignored the hushed converstion between husband and wife. My butt tingled from sitting for so long, but the odd feeling quickly dissappated as I followed the college girl out of the room and the few steps into the kitchen.

Unlike the wolves and rats that had long established factions in St. Louis, the werelion pride was small and new and practically pacifistic. Most the members were either family or young people still in college. As Amber had explained to me in our previous meeting, she and her husband had chosen to relocate to the city just for that reason. Joseph was strong, but he didn't have the personality necessary to balance the challenges and infighting that came with a large shifter group and so shared power in a triumvirate of sorts with his wife and brother. I had to admire a man who knew his limits, and worked to get around them.

Especially after asking around and hearing some of the second hand horror stories about other werelion prides.

The self-style pinkette gestured to where the phone lay on a marble countertop beside its cradle. I picked it up with a, “Dresden.”

“Oh good, you're still there.” Vivian's sigh of relief brought a frown to my face.

“Yeah, got started later than I planned. What's the emergency?”

Faintly, I could hear the tapping of a pencil against pad through the phone. I could also hear the rustle of mugs as a curious werelioness tried to disguise her evesdropping by searching through a cupboard. I covered the mouthpiece with my hand and whispered a harsh _scat_ while lifting one foot in a parody of a shooing motion. Despite the distracting nose piercing, the girl blushed cutely and stuck her tongue out at me before flouncing off.

“We received a call from the DuPage County sheriff asking for an emergency consult. They've got a revenant vampire in the morgue they are hoping you can, and I quote, _magic some sanity into_.” Vivian's calm voice had a hint of worry to it.

“DuPage...” I trialed off thinking, a worm of unease wriggling up from my stomach. The not unwelcome feel of a warm hand on my shoulder pushed it back down. I didn't often leave St. Louis, and even more rarely traveled beyond Missouri, but my mandate as an Executioner covered the whole tristate area. That included Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois. That included _Chicago_.

My secretary brought me out of musings, misinterpreting my silence. “It's over a four hour drive taking the most direct route, up there by-”

“I know where it is, Viv. Can't the local executioner handle it?”

“He tried, but he's not strong enough to break through the madness and his only other option was vetoed by the living realitves. Until they can get Granny herself again-” I bit my tongue to prevent myself from cutting her off a second time. _Granny._ Despite my misgivings about the location, the case now had my morbid interest. “-and figure out how and why she was turned the granddaughter is refusing to let them do anything. Luckily, it is a traditional layout and the basement has been reinforced. She'll keep. For a while.”

“I had _plans_ tonight. Drinking plans.” I whined into the phone. If I left now, with as little traffic as there was likely to be, I'd be make the trip before the sun rose and we could get some information out of the undead grandmother.

“I know.” The wereleopard sighed. “Do you want me to call the Ulfric and cancel?”

“No, no. I'll do it. He's a friend. Could you call the sheriff back and let him know I'm on my way?”

“Yes Ma'am.”

“Thanks, Vivian. You are a peach.” I waited for the calm recitation of an address, then pressed the reciever to the cradle for a moment before picking it back up and beginning to dial one of the few numbers I'd finally memorized. After a couple rings it picked up, but it wasn't Richard. “Jamil, it's Harry. Put Richard on, will you?”

“What? Not even a: _hello, how was your day?_ ”

“Chop-chop drama lama, Queens don't have to listen to riff-raff.” I could practically hear his eyeroll at that statement. Still, he did as asked. One of the few things the man respected was heirarchy. The man was one of the Richard's bodyguards, a werewolf himself, and a times seriously creepy. I never asked, it wasn't my place to ask, but I'd gotten the impression he was bitten very young and basically raised by his former pack. At least, he'd never mentioned any family that wasn't furry related.

Not that we had sit downs but Richard talked. I listened. Occasionally, I abetted the Ulfric's quest for 'me' time that didn't include intimidating bookends.

Richard Zeeman came on the phone, and judging from the first words out of his mouth he knew me too well. “Who died?”

“An old lady, but that's all I know right now. I'm sorry, but I'm gonna have to take a raincheck for dinner.”

“...we could delay an hour or two? You do your crime scene thing and meet me at the bar. Or we eat here? Pasta doesn't take long.”

“No can do. Uncle Sam needs me up north, and I can't say no to family.”

Richard grunted, and in my head I could imagine the built brunette crossing his arms and pouting. “I could _make_ the Cafe stay open.”

“Richard!” I gasped, holding my hand to my heart. “That would be abuse of power! Just tell me now, and I'll ruminate over deadbodies and action sequences.”

“No, feels weird asking such a personal thing over the phone. With our luck, the line would cut out at the most dramatic moment possible.” As if in agreement the Smith's phoneline started to crackle as my ambient magic infected it. “Just let me know when you're back in town, okay? Drive safe.”

“No promises!” I chirped with false cheer as I hung up on the local wolf king and the third member of my own triumvirate. I tilted my head back and pinched the bridge of my nose. Now I just had to let the Smiths know I'd have to postpone our garage tour.

Then it was a four hour drive. In the dark.

Ladies and gentlemen, my life.


	2. The 'A' Plot

I've been told I have a pretty good poker face, insofar as I have no bluff to speak of. I've stared down my godmother, my mentors, and ancient hunter spirits. I've challenged things older, stronger, and a hell of a lot wiser than me. Most of that time I was either piss scared, or too angry to care that the only logical way for any of those confrontations to end was all six foot plus of me six feet down in a pine box. Somehow, I was still around to spit in the eye of reason.

Amber Smith may have been a queen, but she was no Mab. I shrugged into my leather duster as her husband carefully folded up the blueprint for the binding circle from where it lay on the coffee table. Joseph was stocky where she was slender, as if he'd gained all the mass his wife shed under their mutual stresses. Watching me in the entryway, Amber pressed glossy, pink lips into a thin line at odds with the wrinkle forming on her forehead. It was intimidating in a way that threats and force had never matched. My throat went a little dry, even as a ghostly huff of amusement brushed the back of my neck.

I didn't want my abrupt departure to look like I was giving up on their case, or that I considered the lions any less important than another client. Plenty of others had already done that. During my brief conversation with Cherry I'd gleaned that Amber's miscarriages were both a subject of gossip and something of a cautionary tale among the furry factions of St. Louis. Somehow, by the time I'd explained that the emergency was _Executioner_ related and that _no_ , I really couldn't wait as I was going to be racing the sunrise I'd walked out of the little house on the plains of suburbia with pockets full of provisions.

Even after having witnessed the efficiency with which Charity Carpenter ran her kitchen, I did not know Tupperware came in that many colors, sizes, or that with the speed shapeshifters could move the sound of so many lids snapping open and closing sounded eerily like the shoot out scene of an old western.

The heart of Chicago lay in Cook County, Illinois. DuPage County butted right up against Cook like the small spoon in a lover's embrace. Once upon a time Naperville had been its own distinct township, but thanks to the miracle that is modern urban sprawl and expansion that cute cuddle had started to look more like a headlock until Naperville became just another suburb of the windy city.

Thus far in my tenure in the world unmasqued, I had avoided my former home. The counterpart of my former home. For all that streets names were mostly the same, there were dragon bones in the Field Museum and in Jackson Park instead of a robed golden woman with arms upraised the park's namesake leaned casually on his infamous cane with teeth bared in a mad little grin. Where McAnally's used to be there was now a boutique that sold home baked goods for dogs. Seeing that, those first terrifying days when I had truly thought I was caught in some faerie trap or had finally lost it under the mountain of pressure that was my life, I had fled back to St. Louis and stayed there.

It hurt less. The truth not so glaring. I could pretend, if only for the few precious seconds when I woke up for the day, that everyone I knew and loved and the city I had spent years defending was still there. If I didn't have to look at it everyday, to see the little changes, Chicago could still be _my_ Chicago. I didn't lose my home, again. I had simply chosen to relocate, after the embarrassment that was sudden onset breast syndrome. Denial, thy name is Dresden.

But sooner or later life comes calling and the uncanny valley waits for no man, woman, or man shaped being. My stomach roiled as I drove. I hunched over the steering wheel, eyes straining into the dark, and self soothed with the tiny teacakes Amber had packed me. They were nothing like the steak sandwiches Mac could fry up, but even if the man had an equivalent in Neo-Chicago I wouldn't know where to begin looking for him. Neutral territory wasn't something that just happened, and there were no Accords to speak of.

There was a reason our most bat-shit ballsy president had supplanted _The Republic_ in the park.

When I finally parked at Mukasa & Sons Funeral Parlor it was well past midnight. Vivian's estimate of the drive up fifty-five had been overly optimistic, but then construction zones put a cramp in everyone's travel plans no matter the hour. I turned off the engine and unclipped my seatbelt, scanning the parking lot with tired eyes as I did so. Aside from my Jeep, there were three other vehicles parked in front of the small business, one of which was a black-and-white.

I swung open the door of my wrangler, hopped out, pushed the last half of a hard boiled egg into my mouth and spared a moment to brush the collected crumbs from my red button up and gray slacks. First impressions, and all that. I checked my reflection in the side mirror and ran my tongue over my teeth to fish out the the remains of my ad-hoc dinner. I wasn't wearing any makeup that needed correcting, so with a final pat down of my rather rambunctious hair I called it good.

Reaching into the backseat, I fished out both my staff and the small duffle that contained my animating kit. With one to hand and the other slung over my shoulder I headed toward the tunnel of bright light, ignoring the way it caused the decorative trees to cast shadows that would give Snow White deja-vu. It opened before I even reached it, and a cranky looking officer with bags under his eyes and venti coffee in his hands stood in the doorway. “...Harry Dresden?”

I grunted an affirmative, plucking my executioner's license from where it languished amid salt packets, sticks of gum, loose bullet casings, and other random findings in my duster pocket. I waved it in the cops face and his scowl deepened as he continued to hold the door like a disgruntled gentleman and I shuffled in. I was pretty sure Ronnie got the same reaction from her clients. It was a guy thing.

Really.

I don't know the exact statistics but there are a lot of people who would pass up a Veronica on the basis that ladies shouldn't be investigating salacious behavior. When they hired a Ronnie, they were expecting biceps that could crack walnuts or a small, snarky dude in a fedora. I don't know what the DuPage cops were thinking when they called for a Harry but I probably wasn't it.

To be fair, _Harry Dresden_ wasn't nearly as famous a name as _Anita Blake_. Everyone in the business new I'd changed my name, we were a fairly small community and word travels fast, but that didn't mean it was common knowledge.

“'Bout time you got here.” The man scowled and neatly sidestepped around me, taking the lead as we walked past viewing rooms tastefully decorated and painted in dark browns and forest greens. I managed to spot the silver of his namepin on his chest. It matched the now standard silver crosses pinned to his shirt collar. Carmicheal. Black uniform, black leather belt wrapped around a tucked in belly, and a full head of black hair. The guy was nothing like the Carmicheal I once knew, the name was probably coincidence, and yet... “We were expecting you an hour ago.”

It was the tone, I decided. The dismissive, slightly disgusted tone was identical. And yet, it was the dismissive portion that made me think it wasn't actually me he was annoyed with. It still raised the hairs on my arm, my own contrary nature coming to the fore, and I forced the most diabetic inducing smile I could manage to my face as I responded “I'm sorry, I left my invisible jet in my other pants.”

“Do you think this is funny? There's a god-damned abomination in there and its a fucking miracle no one's dead.”

“Well aside from the abomination.” I snarked, hitching my step so the sheathed machete in the duffle bag would stop grinding into my rib. I shivered. It was cold in the building, but the chill I was feeling had nothing to do with temperature. I reigned my aura in as best I could, normally something I only bothered with when I was actively trying not to wreck electronics, but like calls to like. “And last I checked it isn't a crime to be an old vampire. Kinda the reverse, actually. Like Sunny and Cher.”

Carmicheal's face didn't twitch from his disgusted frown, and I know I'm not at my funniest when I'm tired with a sore back from hours and hours of driving, but if he wasn't careful it was going to get stuck like that. “I don't know what the fuck is in that fridge, but it isn't a vampire.”

We turned off the carpeted hallways and onto laminate. It was pho-marble with streaks of pink and blue in it, and so shiny I could have probably used it as a portal to the Nevernever. The walls were the same dark, unobtrusive brown as the previous area but instead of a soothing insulating air these held a distinct utilitarian feel. The baby fine hairs on my arms rose as my power shifted in response, perking up like a hound with a scent.

Sometimes the dead lingered, though never for long. Ghosts could only last until their purpose was fulfilled, and it was a dangerous and tough material world out there for young spirits without a sanctuary. Usually, that sancutary was their literal grave. Other times, it was something that they had held dear in life. The former was the reasoning behind iron gates and consecrated ground in cemetery design – it locked the spirits in place until they got bored enough to move on. The latter, well, I personally never saw the appeal in those _Child's Play_ movies after having lived it.

The funeral home was full of ghosts and spirits, which wasn't unusual, as the building would shield them from the deleterious effects of the sun. They weren't happy, but then they were dead, and they knew what I was. Just as my power let me sense them, they in turn could recognize the necromancer in me and there was nothing the dead feared more than a powerful necromancer. Even an animator got wary respect, and I was a powerhouse that had woken vampires in the middle of the fucking day. On accident. Sure, Jean-Claude had been more amused than anything else but the fact remained when I spoke, the dead _listened_.

Strangely, I'd gotten the sense that it wasn't me that had the spirits in defensive clusters.

My shoulders hunched in sympathy, and my mood did not improve at the sight of steel reinforced double doors along with the second police officer guarding them. He had his arms crossed over his chest and every now and then a loud thumping could be heard from the inside of the locked room. Each time it happened, the man flinched. It was a small movement, just a tightening of his grip on his own arms, but my vision was better than I remembered it ever being and noticing the little things was bread and butter to both a PI and a wizard.

Beside Carmichael's partner there was another, more portly man in civvies who didn't even bother with the pretense, instead sitting on an overturned mop bucket and holding a sawed off double barrel loosely in his flannel clad arms. Since he wasn't being arrested for the weapon, I assumed he was the local executioner. We got all sorts of fun permits in the name of survival.

I came to stop beside the balding man's bucket, planted my feet, and put on my brightest grin. “Good Morning! Executioner Dresden, at your service!” My staff gave a sharp click against the floor, like a punctuation.

Red, sleep deprived eyes slid over my equally exhausted, if faking, form. Not all executioners were animators, but the inbuilt resistance to a vampire's mind thrall tended to cause a lot of overlap. As a result most executioners were used to odd hours and night shifts, but there was a huge difference in the level of energy required to stake an unresisting corpse, read a good book, and guard a room housing a frustrated murder machine.

“Mosely.” He said by way of introduction, his hunched shoulders relaxing marginally as his gaze lingered briefly on my chest before drifting to the duffle I carried. He didn't appear to have any equipment of his own, aside from executioner gear, but maybe it was in another room. He gave a long exhale and drawled with a soft, southern twang that had a little something extra I could swear I'd heard before but couldn't quite place, “Thank _god_ you're here. Maybe you can talk some sense into Marie, woman to woman.”

“What do you mean?” I bit my tongue at the woman comment and dropped my pack onto the floor, pushing it against the wall with a foot. I think I just found the Harry to Carmicheal's Carmichael. Animation wasn't a terribly rare skill, but that didn't mean it was common either. To my knowledge, being a wizard, I was one of the strongest necromancy adepts in the United States and possibly all of North America. Only John Burke had the skill and experience to slap me upside the head so fast I'd be seeing skeletal tweeties, but he was mostly retired, and the only other practioner I'd met who could even play in the same ballpark was Larry Kirkland my sometimes apprentice.

Standing beside him, with my aura reaching out and brushing against his, unless they guy was trained as well as some of the White Council's Warden's in control Mosely wasn't even in the parking lot. For a man who made his living putting down vampires and binding the dead, having to admit he needed help must have been like chewing nails. As if reacting to my own nerves a trio of thuds sounded out on the other side of the steel door. “All I was told was that a will was in question and the heirs needed to talk to the vic, and that can't be done once the vampire's remains are disposed of. Where's Sheriff Johansen?”

“In bed.” Officer Carmicheal grumbled, stalking over to stand by his partner, creating an unpassable wall of authority. “Where I should be.”

“Shall I get you some cheese to go with that whine, Carmicheal?” Executioner Mosely glared at the cop and stood abruptly from his mop bucket. I could hear his knees pop, and from the silver streaks in what was left of his hair he had to have been pushing past forty. Maybe fifty. For an executioner, that was downright ancient. The man turned toward me and slid the modified shotgun into a custom made thigh holster, which was balanced out by a considerable hunting knife sheathed opposite.

“Fuck you, priest.”

“I'm not Voudoun, you ignorant shi-”

Carmicheal's partner coughed, loudly. Repeatedly. He beat a hand against his chest as if trying to dislodge something and as we all turned toward him he gave a smile with watery eyes. “S-sorry. Swallowed some spit there, went down the wrong pipe.”

“Christ, George.” Carmicheal's eyes rolled, but the break in tension was shattered by a dull, bowel quivering screech.

“What the hell?” I hissed, whirling to face the door with my shield bracelet bared and suddenly wishing I was free to just light the other room on fire. The runes and sigils on my staff crackled with static as my own power pooled around me, ready, shifting against the cold spots left by the disturbed spirits.

“Come on, Dresden.” Mosely clapped my shoulder, gesturing down the hall with his free hand. As we got further from the cops and the doorway to hell I could hear him grumbling, “I was hunt'n monsters when they were hiding behind their mama's skirts, but do you hear any respect? No. Just 'cause I don't carry a badge anymore. It's Mostly this, and Mostly that. Well, just wait till I _mostly_ send a flock of zombie crows to crap all over your patrol car. I _can_ do that, you know.”

“They don't like animators, I take it?” Or maybe it was Executioner's muscling in on their territory. I didn't tend to pay too much attention to politics, but as it might effect me I'd been keeping an eye on the latest legislative movement to make Executioner's outright Federal Marshalls. Very have gun will travel. Very fuck you to local jurisdiction.

Mosely shook his head and put his hands in his pockets, body language closing him up like a rusty pickle jar. “'s personal. Don't worry about it.”

“Okay... can you tell me about the case, then? Sheriff Johansen didn't say much.”

“Probably because he's embarrassed as hell, and already had to deal with one ambulance today because of it. Problem is, our revenant back there had a living will. If she died and vampirism was suspected, I was to come and drive a stake through her heart before she ever rose.”

“But you didn't. And now she's,” I made little air quotes with my hands, which takes some talent when one is carrying a magic staff. “ _alive_ so you can't, even if she's beserking? What happened? Why is she here and not in a secure morgue?”

Mosely opened his mouth to answer, but instead of that not quite good 'ole boy accent he was overridden by the dulcet tones of a thirty something career woman in funeral black. She stepped out of what clearly had been an office, strands of straightened black hair sticking up at random as she ran her hand through it in a futile attempt to tamp it down, and tugged her blouse into order with movements as precise as and clipped as her speech.

“Because my grandmother was - _is_ \- nearly eighty-nine, Miss Dresden, and when they found her dead in her home no one thought to check for signs of a vampire bite. Bites.” There was a blurring blackness around her red rimmed eyes, I didn't know if it was from mascara or eyeshadow, but whatever crying the woman had been doing had been done carefully. She held out her hand, and I accepted with a nod. “Marie Chantrelle.”

“That's 'cause that wasn't any signs of a struggle, no defensive wounds, nothing on her neck-” Mosely was explaining, and the calm matter of fact way he detailed things reminded me of his missing badge comment. Marie's chin jutted out and for a moment I thought she was going to stab the older man with her finger.

“I _told_ Johansen I found iron pills in her medicine cabinet! My father-”

“-she'd already had one stroke on record. Her blood was tested, all they found was anemia, no diseases or foul play. Your old man may be swine, Marie, but he ain't a killer.” Mosely continued over Marie's interruption, taking us all into the office. It was a fairly plain one, but from the plaques promoting the Better Business Breuer I was willing to guess it belonged to either Mukasa or his sons. Her sons? “The coroner had no reason to do a full autopsy.”

“Even so.” I broke the stalemate while poking at one of those little dipper bird things that was sitting on the ornate desk. “It takes about seventy two hours for a newborn vampire to rise: three bites over three nights, unless whoever did the deed was a strong master. Very strong.”

Marie didn't sag, but she did drop into a chair as though she might loose the support of her legs at any minute. “Tonight is the third night. Every morning I would call granny to check up on her, make sure she was okay, see if she needed a handyman around, that sort of thing... but she when she didn't pick up the phone I thought maybe... maybe dad was visiting. Or she was talking to the neighbor. The line was busy, after all, and dad has been trying to pull the prodigal son bit ever since he found out how much he is _not_ inheriting.

“But then she didn't call _me_ either, and the next day the line was _still_ busy so I called Sheriff Johansen to check up on her. The door wasn't locked. She just sitting on the couch with the TV running. Dead.

“She's the only family I had that was worth a damn, Miss Dresden.” Marie looked up at me, dark eyes burning, and I had to look away first. Trembling hands tucked into a skirt clad lap. “I wasn't expecting it, but I'll be damned if I let her die again.”

Mosely scoffed had hauled up a satchel from the underside of the desk, and I recognized the jar of not peanut butter that he took out of it for what it was. Anointment oil. Every animator had their own personal blend, a potion in all but name, that heightened psychic sensitivity while also fortifying the mind. It wasn't necessary, not to me, but a lot of minor talents and weaker animators used it.

I'd come up with a formula too, if only for appearances sake and to teach Larry.

I turned my attention back to Marie as Mosely took out a set of stakes and laid them out on the desk as if weighing their utility for the job ahead. When next I spoke, it was with knowledge that trickled into the forefront of my mind like a half-forgotten memory. I wasn't sure if it was something Anita had known or something... else. “She's not your grandmother, Ms. Chantrelle. Not really, not now. Without a master vampire -a true master, not just one old or skilled enough to control his own hunger- to call the mind back along with the heartbeat, all that is left is a few scattered memories and reactions. What was your grandmother is, currently, very much a newborn. An angry, hungry newborn with the strength to rip us apart like human tissue paper.”

“I know that.” Marie hissed, arm flinging outward as if to backhand the facts into submission. “ _He_ told me as much. But she's still my granny Lulu, and she hasn't, she hasn't _killed_ anyone-”

“Not for lack of trying.” Mosely whispered under his own breath as he slid what looked like a modified metal tent stake up his sleeve. “Poor bastard nearly lost an arm.”

“-so you cannot _execute_ her!”

I leaned my head against my staff and let my eyes wander around the room. There were cold spots, whispers just this side of unintelligible, and if I opened my Sight I was sure the room would be packed with people. “What, exactly, is it you want me to do Ms. Chantrelle?”

“Vampires fear you, do they not, Ms. Dresden? They fear your power. I want you to use that power to calm my granny and find out who turned her. A corpse is a corpse is a corpse, is it not?”

I stared wide eyed at the woman. There was a strange, almost peaceful expression on her face. I turned my gaze to Mosely, hoping my own expression was communicating what I didn't dare put into words. Was Marie Chantrelle crazy? Did she even realize what she was asking? If so, it was no wonder Executioner Mosely couldn't do the job. He carried a bit more weight than I would have expected of a professional monster hunter, but he carried it well. There were muscles under that fat and if he needed to move I imagined he could book it as well as anyone.

But that didn't mean he could bind vampires to his will. He couldn't make a raised zombie look like anything but what it was. I could. I wouldn't, doing such was dangerously close to breaking the Laws and while there were no wardens to enforce the Council I still agreed with the laws of magic, but I _could_. It was the main reason fully fledged necromancers used to be killed on sight as often as vampires.

“Empty night,” I said, struck by a sudden thought. I was Jean-Claude's human servant, and with that came certain advantages. Most I actively ignored, but if I could share Richard's senses and JC's power boosted my own necromancy maybe I could actually pull this off without getting my throat ripped out by a mindless stomach with teeth. “I can't promise anything, as we'll have to use the Italian method.”

“What?” Mosely questioned, a resigned sigh escaping his lips. Yeah, buddy, I would rather have just blown out the monster's head, too.

I rested a fist on my hip and gave a saucy grin that held more confidence than I was actually feeling. “Throw some theory at the wall and see what sticks.”

“And if that doesn't work?”

“Then we go with Plan B.” For Boomstick. My gaze dropped to where Mosely had holstered his sawed-off. My fellow executioner gave a small nod letting me know he understood that our own safety was priority, not Marie Chantrelle's wishes.

Marie wasn't happy _at all_ when I outlined my plan, but like hell I was going to risk having my wrist opened like a can of tomato sauce.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh, if you spotted the cameo good on you. I swear, I was halfway through the 1st draft of this chapter when the soundtrack began to autoplay in youtube and I couldn't stop myself from tweaking the outline to accommodate a third crossover. My roommate refused to stop me either. _Curse you Meghan!_


	3. What Can You Tell Me About... Voodoo?

Mosely, Marie, and I walked back down the hallway to where the two uniforms kept watch. Mosely stayed several steps behind to make up the rear of our miserable little trio and I wasn't sure if it was because he wanted a buffer between himself and Ms. Chantrelle, or because he simply preferred the visual of her walking away. Whichever; it wasn't my place to judge. She kept pace beside me as if fighting the urge to take the lead, jaw clenched, the tension in her body coiling tighter with every meaty thud of flesh against steel. She was the sort of woman who was used to having her will be done, and after my _expert_ second opinion weighed in against granny Marie was not a happy overlady.

Such was the double-edged sword of the supernatural being the preternatural. When the goblins and ghoulies show up in the cold, factual pages of taxonomy texts as leftover curiosities from a less enlightened age they lose part of that otherness that sends the hindbrain screaming. Only when alone and away from the safety of the herd is it that a person remembers that being afraid of the dark wasn't a childish habit. It was a survival mechanism.

As much as I enjoy being recognized for what I do, and not getting threatened with lawsuits for misrepresentation or worse, the skewed dichotomy that resulted from the magical being lowered to the mundane is hands down a more terrifying and effective glamor than all the illusions of fairie. Marie Chantrelle knew her grandmother had risen as a mindless vampire: a revenant. Within the decade since Addison V. Clarke had ruled in favor of the bloodsuckers, and vampires had become the new black, the government had taken to broadcasting PSA's about the damn things. Revenants were akin to those commercials about brains being on drugs – you don't share needles, and you don't share donors.

Marie knew this, and still she believed reality would bend to her wishes and the power of love or something similar would bring Lulu out of her madness. It wouldn't. Magic had rules, and once you punched your ticket on the transpecies transformation train there were no refunds.

That was a lesson I'd learned burning myself out through sleepless nights and waking nightmares. Sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we just can't save the women we love. Sometimes the lemons are too rotted for lemonade. There is no magic word to turn shit into gold. Without the vampire that turned her to use the link between master and minion to make her heart beat -Granny Lulu was more like an out of control uberzombie at the moment- and recall her mind, Mosely and I had all the rights in the eyes of the law to fill the clear and present danger full of silver laced buckshot.

Luckily, being the awe inspiring spell slinger that I am, we didn't need to. Theoretically.

If we had any idea of who bit her, we could get a writ of execution on the bastard for reckless abandonment and premeditated homicide. I'm never sure if that second charge is in relation to who the revenant ends up killing, or the suicide-by-cop for the revenant itself, but either way I end up with a minimum of two body bags. If I was the sort of person who prayed now would be the time, but despite the resident angel in my skull I wasn't. So I didn't.

I glanced briefly to the side, making sure Officer Carmichael and Georgie Le Flic could handle any sudden ideas from Marie, and crouched beside my animating duffle. I unzipped the heavy canvass bag and removed the army surplus machete in its hard plastic sheathe, only peripherally aware of my fellow executioner squatting beside me in professional interest. Setting the blade to the side, I rooted through the rest of the bag's contents discarding a dried chicken foot bound with glass beads and burial shroud, several empty containers for any interesting things I might come upon, a spare set of shirt and pants neatly folded into a gallon zip lock bag, one of those salt packs with the little girl in a yellow dress and umbrella, and a jar of goofer dust before finally finding the little plastic travel bottle I'd been rummaging for wedged in a corner.

I do not understand how other women deal with purses. They are like the adult equivalent of a Lego bucket: you can never find the item you want, until you get so frustrated you don't want it anymore, and then there is nothing but three piece blocks for you to forget about and step on in the middle of the night. My live in PA's ability to reach blindly into her own purse and pluck the correct lipstick tube from the pit never ceases to amaze me.

“You pick that up from Dixieland?” Mosely's question startled me, and I spasmed, nearly dropping jam jar of concentrated hoodoo. After a series of juggler-esque fumbles on my part, I held the thick glass container to my chest and blinked at the portly man.

“Uh?” I blurted eloquently, ignoring the exasperated sigh from the peanut gallery. Mosely gestured vaguely at the goofer dust, the action causing a newly donned charm of bone and googley eyed beads to clink merrily, and I nodded with a slight frown. That accent that wasn't an accent, where had I heard it before? “Yeah. You know it?”

He gave me a depreciating smile. “Could say that. 'S quality product, though. Most gambling boats on the Mississippi won't let you on if you got oil on you - no difference between that and count'n cards, far as the House is concerned.

“Can't say I'm not surprised, though,” Mosely continued as we both rose, me having finished repacking the duffle and him unscrewing the lid to a repurposed peanut butter jar that now held a cloudy, viscous oil of his own make. The scent of rosemary and sage suffused the air. Rosemary, for memory. Sage, for wisdom. Personally, I preferred the latter in combination of freshly caught fish and a slap of lemon butter. “They sell an Abramelin Oil most will swear by. I'd use it myself it weren't so damn expensive.”

“I prefer to do my own mixing.” I offered with a shrug and squirted a portion of my own anointment oil come séance potion into my left palm before snapping the cap shut and sliding the bottle into my duster pocket. Mosely spread a thick dab of pungent oil on his forehead, just above and between his eyes. He shivered. Another swipe of his fingers just above his lip would keep the scent of the herbs fresh in his mind, and from a practical standpoint help with any less-than-fresh corpses.

Unnecessary in this case, but I suspected the action had been repeated often enough to become habit. For myself, I chewed gum like a madwoman for everything but the freshly dead and it drove my former boss, Bert, bonkers. It wasn't professional, or something.

I swirled pointer and middle finger around the small pool in my palm, closing my eyes and pushing my magic into the mixture to revitalize the components as I did so. It wasn't something I would even try with a potion of another practitioner's make, but this one was every bit a part of me as my staff. I'd gathered the ingredients and mixed it from ground up, each part of the process imbuing bits with my will, and while potions usually had depressingly short shelf lives instead of going flat the anointment oil was more like a limb that had fallen numb. I just had to shake it up.

Anointment oil did several different things, depending on what the practitioner wanted it for, but most often it was used to sharpen the mind and reinforce auras. Basically, when you were contacting spirits and demons you wanted to keep what was out, out and what was in, in.

It's not paranoia when the spawn of hell gleefully admit they are out to get you.

I had started with an olive oil base, extra virgin as I was feeling nostalgic at the time of brewing, and then built it with an eye to refine and filter my natural skill with the dead. With cinnamon and myrrh, garlic and parsley, anyone reading the notebooks in my lab might think I was cooking some Mediterranean dish if not for the recipe also calling for the tobacco harvested from a cigarette alongside the bottled sounds of the first fistfuls of dirt hitting a coffin.

I smeared the oily liquid on my forehead, right over where I imagined my third eye to be, and felt my power shiver into alignment. It was like jumping into a cold lake, every sense shocked into awareness and when I opened my eyes again what had been ignorable whispers and cold spots were _people_. Faint and glowing like something out of Disney's Haunted Mansion. I blinked, swallowed, and forced myself to look past all the shades as if they were not there.

Spirits, much like the fae, only had as much power in the mortal world as we gave them. Unlike the fae, they didn't have staying power. If you ignored them they couldn't do much more than hide your car keys or cause you to turn up the heater, but only if you refused to acknowledge their existence. Most people didn't have magical sensitivity, and had no problem walking right through them with barely a shiver.

Sensitives, practitioners, and most especially _animators_ did not have that luxury. All those stories of poltergeists? Look it up: they almost universally involve a family with children. Children and teenagers that are magically sensitive, don't know better, start _paying attention_ and _feeding_ whatever lingering spirit was haunting the house and suddenly you've got stacked chairs and bleeding walls.

I wiped my hands clean on my slacks, leaving darker splotches against the gray material, and drew the machete from it's sheathe with a near silent whisk. I'd never bothered to install a loop into my duster for it like I did my blasting rod, but then the blade usually only served to make the animal sacrifices I needed for the more lifelike zombies. Tonight, all I had on me was _me_.

__With my free hand I took up my staff from where it waited against the wall. My fingers curled around the dark, polished wood and immediately the runes carved along the top lit with a blue-white glow. Restless spirits and ghosts fled from the werelight, though washed out and rendered nearly invisible by the overhead halogens it was tangible to the dead in a way few things were. Some backed away, down the hall, and others tumbled soundlessly through sheetrock into the rooms beyond. Mosely huffed, narrowed eyes darting after retreating figures only he and I could see, and took point on the steel doors._ _

__I held my staff aloft, allowing the werelight to shine with power and faith, and followed on his heels. Mosely held his shotgun tucked loosely against his body, comfortable, finger resting easy on the trigger blade. In addition to the charm on his wrist he'd pulled a crucifix from beneath his shirt that it gleamed with a power of its own._ _

__Unfortunately, if my plan went to shit, crosses and faith would be about as much use as a defective condom. Insanity, remember?_ _

__“Have faith, my host.” Lash's voice came clear as a bell as I stared hard at the vaguely humanoid shape reflected in the gleaming steel. I felt her body, unseen, press into mine, one arm snaking around to cup my breast as though I weren't wearing clothes at all. She squeezed and I sucked in a breath, knuckles bleeding to white at the foreign sensation. I pinned my lower lip between my teeth and bit down, lightly, reigning in my own neglected libido as my celestial girlfriend nibbled at my neck. “And if you allow me to assist...”_ _

__“Thanks, but no thanks.” I shook my head. Lash was more than she had once been, but even when she meant well the idea of the angel manipulating my magic herself was unsettling. Deeply. So as much I still eschewed thinking about the folds of my womanly parts, in this case I would rather get physically intimate than metaphysically. Sort of._ _

__Having an invisible girlfriend that lives your head is _complicated,_ okay? Love is an art, not a science. _ _

__Lash pinched my nipple in spite and I squeaked. After glaring at nothing, I closed my eyes and searched for the connections that drifted just out of sight. They were marks on my very soul, like the scours made by an arborist in preparation for grafting a new limb to a tree, but I wasn't doing something simple like sticking some pears onto an apple tree._ _

__I had a good chunk of werewolf and vampire hardwired into my most basic essence, and the long term repercussions of that was still to be determined. Worst case? The mental barriers that kept us separate failed and our personalities went into a vampiric blender. My hand his hand. My voice his voice. Resistance is futile._ _

__I didn't hate Jean-Claude. He was pretty fun when he wasn't in Master of the City mode, but I wasn't stupid. He had centuries of life experience over me. Richard and I would barely be blimps on the radar if that happened._ _

__I mentally reached for the bond that felt colder than the other. Lash licked at the soft skin behind my ear and my magic surged down the chain of death and sex and life to make contact with the incubus that was my self-proclaimed master. I groaned aloud at the sudden heat low in my belly. I could sense Jean-Claude's interest like a second pair of hands on my body, though these were hesitant. They rested on my shoulders, stroked my hair, and a voice like warm silk against my skin questioned, “To what do I owe the honor, ma petite?”_ _

__For a brief second I thought I could see him, as though I were at his estate in St. Louis and not some small funeral home outside Chicago. He was dressed in leather pants, skin tight, and matching vest decorated with silver accents. Hooks, nails, small blades. His head was tilted like a curious cat as he looked up at me._ _

__As quickly as it came the vision vanished, and I was back in the hallway with two disgruntled cops behind me and a murderous revenant ahead. His voice didn't leave. Someone's hands were making warm, slow circles over the chakra point near my belly. “Where are you? It is not within my domains, I do not think...”_ _

__“Work,” I whispered just under my breath, partly because I didn't want anyone to start shooting at me in the confined space and partly because if I spoke any louder I might descend into irregular squeaking. “Federal stuff.”_ _

__“Are you killing vampires, Harry?” When Jean-Claude said the words, killing vampires, he was slow and careful and dangerous. I had no problem responding with cheerful honesty._ _

__“I'm trying to avoid that, actually.” My words were received with a bundle of emotion, complicated but pleased, and I sighed. “Stick around? I think I'm going to need you in a minute.”_ _

__Jean-Claude did not respond immediately, but I got the phantom sensation of sitting on something long and plush. A mental bleed over. Finally, the Master of St. Louis hummed and I could feel the dip of a head that was not my head with a caveat of, “We shall discuss this further when you return, oui?”_ _

__I didn't want to. I opened my mouth to give a noncommittal response, and sucked in a gasp as strong, pianists fingers played against the soft, sensitive skin below my stomach. Creeping downward. I shivered stepping forward, shaking off both Lash and Jean-Claude, and reminded myself that he was doing me a favor. I exhaled, “Oui.”_ _

__My magic, attuned through arousal as it was, synchronized with Jean-Claude's own power and spilled out of me like hounds racing from a gate. I thrust my staff forward, runes aglow, pointing it like a spear as my senses carried through the wall on the flood of my power. Corpses lay scattered just out of sight, though I _could_ see them, half dressed and discarded and chewed on. Misty ghosts lurked further out, scowling and afraid, shaking their heads as if through that action alone they could deny my power._ _

__My outstretched arm moved of its accord, like a filing to a magnet, drifting to the left of the door. My forehead tingled where I'd rubbed the potion and I knew down to my bones that was where our revenant was. Shuffling with hunger and indecision, Lulu was afraid of me._ _

__Her skin was sallow, bloodstained, and saggy. The remains of a tattered blouse hung off one liver spotted shoulder. Hollywood often embellished the facts to make their movies more palatable to their audiences, but only one vampire line cleaned up acne upon transition to club twilight and even that had limits. Granny had been pushing ninety. It showed._ _

__“Gotcha.” I smirked, and plucked at the air with my will to call winds to trap her. Lulu howled, tossing back a mane of smoky gray hair when her body fell to the binding spell. Her arms were pulled against her torso as she struggled but the cocoon of air I'd conjured wasn't something that could be broken by raw force._ _

__It wasn't the best binding around, but it was one I knew backwards and forwards and did not have to expend excess energy or concentration to maintain. I'd invented the damn thing in a rush of teenage hormones years ago, ignoring the fatal flaw in it's construction anyone with some time and thought could exploit, but that flaw had saved my life twice over. I let it be. Lulu was too insane to even think about using the more subtle skills of the undead to explore her prison, and I needed her head free._ _

__If I corrected the hole in the spell, I'd probably end up accidentally suffocating any living beings caught by it._ _

__“Okay,” I said, shaking off the necro-vision like a dog did water, and lowering my staff. I turned to face Carmicheal, to tell him to unlock the steel doors, only to see him staring at me with a vaguely disgusted expression on his face._ _

__Everyone was staring at me. Even Mosely, though he appeared more amused than anything else._ _

__“...I, uh, are you alright to continue, Executioner Dresden?” The younger officer finally asked, stumbling over his words as he thumbed the safety of his gun on and off in nervous habit._ _

__My cheeks, I realized, were flushed. Lash's fingers were still tangled in the short, curling hairs at the back of my neck. I sputtered and made to cross my arms in defensive reflex, before aborting the motion due to the eighteen inch knife I was holding. I'd basically let a myself get molested in public, but I took comfort in the fact I was at least dressed this time. “I-I'm _fine_. Lulu's on lockdown. Carmichael?”_ _

__He grunted his acknowledgement, and depressed a bump in the wall I would have sworn was a bumper for the door handle. The heavy steel doors slowly swung open as the hydraulics, ostensibly to help when wheeling out occupied coffins, squealed from deformations that occurred when supernaturally strong but not supernaturally tough flesh impacts against metal. Sweeping lines scraped into the linoleum._ _

__Lulu saw us, and screeched like a cat being skinned alive. Shivers and gooseflesh erupted on my arms as blue eyes peeked disgustedly out of my black ones and Mosely wheeled on the vampire like a dog on point. Chocolate eyes widened as he took in the trussed up grandmother, his whole body vibrating with the need to shoot first, shoot second, shoot third and when all that was left was the squirming remains ask questions._ _

__“Shiiit, Dresden. When you said binding I thought you were gonna bind it to your will like a zombie-” we both winced as Lulu's head jinked to the side, and we could both hear the cracking of brittle neck bones. Her mouth yawned open beyond anything human, and I ignored the choked off gasp from the hallway. The sharp, gleaming fangs that had grown up through the gums where Lulu's eyeteeth had once been looked strange in an otherwise empty mouth. “-not trap her in magic saran wrap.”_ _

__“I may have power, but crazy has it's own kind of strength.” I commented, instinctively stepping over scattered bits of corpses my power had mapped out with it's first rush. Mosely's description was accurate. My spell left absolutely zero wiggle room. One breast was hanging lower than the other, both bare and squished as if going through a mammogram. “If you think I'm putting my mind against _that_ , I've got some beachfront property in Arizona for you.”_ _

__“I confess, Harry.” Jean-Claude's voice came stilted, a distant echo in my ears as I pushed back the sleeve of my duster. “Traditionally such an abomination would be exterminated by the local master. I do not relish the idea of this... woman... in my kiss.”_ _

__“Come on, she ain't that bad. Everyone's cranky when they wake up on the wrong side of the gurney. A little O-neg and...” I trailed off with a hiss and pressed the edge of the machete to my forearm. The revenant's eyes blazed, white and demonic in a twisted mirror of the light cast by my staff. The skin on her face pulled tight as if her skull was to big for it. She strained against my binding and made a clucking, sucking noise as she stared at me. I caught her blazing gaze with my own._ _

__Someone was making wet, gasping sounds. It might have been me._ _

__Vampires didn't have souls, but they did have a mental magic of their own that relied on eye contact. I had an inbuilt defense against it, as all practitioners with a death affinity did, but even then I wouldn't normally risk it. Normally, I didn't have both an angel and a master class incubus passive-aggressively fighting over who got to ride shotgun in my noggin._ _

__Unblinking, I advanced on the bound vampire with Jean-Claude's power pulsing through the marks that connected us. I skin felt hot, almost feverish and my vision narrowed to a tunnel with Lulu at the end. A single drop of blood meandered its way down the machete's edge as I held it above my head. I may have used it mostly for slitting the throats of goats and severing chicken heads from necks, but I kept my work tools cleaned and sterilized. The same couldn't be said of Lulu's mouth._ _

__“... ce que je fais pour l'amour.” Jean-Claude's words curled at my ears, but they did so with my voice. I stood in arms' reach of the revenant for moment and saw Lash behind the dead woman. Her lips were pressed into a line as my own twitched into a blank, polite smile. I lowered the machete with its bloody edge and the revenant's tongue, the palest pink and crisscrossed with fresh scars from where she'd sliced it on her fangs, slithered out from between gaping jaws. “C'est mon sang, se répandre pour toi. C'est mon coeur qui bat pour toi...”_ _

The thick muscle lapped at the blade heedless of the edge, taking my blood as though it were ambrosia. Immediately the world tilted, or I tilted, and I could only stand and scream silently as the living conduit for Jean-Claude's power. It hurtled down the marks that bound us, leaping straight from the blood in my veins to the blood that even now restarted a heart that had lain dormant for three days. 

__A heart that I could feel beating a sluggish tempo behind my own, as I stared in horror at myself staring at Lulu._ _


	4. Dear Abby

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of talking... I promise it is plot relevant. Mostly. Updates will be a bit slower now that I am also running a game night again.

I stared at myself; mind blank but for the sheer volume of senile and terror building until granny's open mouth released our combined emotions. I can't say I had a proper clear thought in that handful of moments. Scraps of memories surged up of another morgue, of the brave little mortician and his love of polka being drowned out by the steady beat of a book against a thigh, of half-rotted hands grasping at the door of my _home_ , of fire and smoke and tears as fat caught and skin shriveled, of spikes through my wrists signing a contract not with ink but _blood_ and _pain,_ of green eyes bright and slitted, of green eyes old and faded, of a stolen body smiling with a false innocence I never suspected, of dreams, of fear, of gradually _losing_ myself- 

“Calm, Harry.” Jean-Claude did not so much as say the words as he spun them into my mind like Charlotte at her web, the silken threads trapping the panic as surely as the bonds of air held Lulu's body. “I am with you, _Ma Petite_.”

The croak of a confused toad worked its way around the heartbeat in our throat. The Corpsetaker had used the connections forged during a soulgaze to swap bodies, but vampires did not have souls. The Traveler had worn lesser vampires like a debutante did ball gowns, but he was capital Dee dead and never switched places besides. I -that is we- blinked as vertigo returned and my body shuffled in front of me, a spark of concern on my face.

To reiterate: vampires do _not_ have souls. Not as humans do. It has been argued, on church grounds and in court, that they have something  similar enough as to make no practical difference. For, as many an experienced vampire hunter can attest, _lamia corpus europa_ possess the reasoning and critical thinking skills that once made the profession of hunting down and exterminating them one of the highest paid on the continent. The reason being most villages did not expect said hired hunter to survive long enough after the job to collect their pay. 

With the rate of how often the inexperienced became vampires themselves, or mortal wounds were inflicted by the death throws of spiteful losers, most pre-industrial villages would be right.

And I'm not even halfway convinced that the extremely unhealthy superstitions regarding animators in Europe is an accident either – but that is a conspiracy theory for another time. Vampires are soulless. Mortals aren't. Yet, as I stared at the dainty features of the face regarding me with Jean-Claude's mask of control a shadow of doubt crept into my mind. JC was a monster. An affable monster, but still a monster.

Had he known this would happen? Our stomach twisted. Our eyes burned.

I knew master vampires could possess their underlings, borrow their senses, and in a broader sense simply  _be aware_ of those blood oathed to them in a way that could make a baby-monitor cry with envy. It had been a little known fact I was counting on when I first suggested to Marie we call her grandmother's mind back with a blood oath. It did not explain how I was the one settled into granny's skin as misty memories, sharper hunger, and raw instinct paused their internal war under Jean-Claude's gaze.

What I was seeing through Lulu... no,  _Lula-May_ Chantrelle's eyes, was as far from human as it was possible to get and still be recognizable. Flames we couldn't see but feel crackled like breaking ice shelves. Light lit me from within, but instead of the red-orange of life's blood cool blue-white suffused my skin. 

I was glowing not unlike the ghosts and spirits that had run from my power, and in Lula-May's undead sight that cold magic roiled in a fog of tempting power and terrifying domination. It spilled over not as a wave, but twisted into babbling brooks and steady streams that wound into a distant, beating darkness.

The realization hit me then, like a forgotten memory returned, and my forehead prickled as the sheer scale of what I was seeing stunned my thoughts to stillness. It was a network of blood and oaths: leash and a life-line all in one as power was sent from masters to minions and back again with every beat of an undead heart.

A nervous system. A massive, global nervous system transmitting power and information through all the little vampiric neurons...

Jean-Claude's whisper of my name pulled my attention like a baited hook, and I bit. I peered through Lula-May's eyes to lock onto pair of beautiful blue flames that warmed my belly and quickened my pulse, calling me. Detangling from the shredded remains of Lula-May's psyche -I did not have three children, I had never been married, I was Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, only son of Malcolm, youngest of Margaret, I'd never met my grandmother and who was most certainly not a hypocritical hedge witch- I gathered my will, and climbed.

Back into myself.

I was shaking as I lowered the machete to _my_ side, clenched fist brushing hip. The cut I'd made to feed granny was already scabbed over and within the hour a bit of picking at it would reveal the palest of scars. Within a day nothing but smooth unblemished flesh would remain. I took a deep breath as my heart pounded in my ears and I tried not to think about the pieces of dead bodies all around us or the chemicals and infinitesimal corpse particles I was likely breathing in.

“I am truly sorry, ma sorcière. I underestimated how strong our bond would be, even with such distance...” Jean-Claude sighed, voice fading as he regretfully handed the metaphorical reins back to me.

“Dresden? You all there, right?” Mosely's shotgun wasn't pointed at Lulu anymore, but at me. A line of perspiration had broken out on his balding head as his eyes and mouth pinched into an unpleasant frown. I blinked at him, at the small but stubborn flames of his own power and life, and nodded jerkily.

“Y-Yeah.” I swallowed, balled up all my misgivings and fear, and tossed them into the dark depths of my mind where my ID could happily punch them into submission. It may have felt like an eternity, but I hadn't spent more than a few seconds inside Lula-May's head. Not even a minute... surely?

“You, ah, got something in your eye.” He gestured with the gun, a motion that had the barrel lifted to center on my head, and I stomped down the urge to cross the distance between us and smack him with it. My duster wasn't buttoned, and at this range borrowed supernatural toughness wouldn't save me from having my skull turned to bloody mulch.

I glared while idly twisting my wrist, the silver shields wrapped around it reflecting focused ovals of light along the ceiling, “It's rude to point,  _Mostly_ .”

“Excuse me for being appropriately wary when weird, freaky shit is going on.” He reddened at the low blow, but finally relented and pointed the barrel up and away from all living and non-living targets. Granny Lulu had stopped trying to eat us, and just hung there sad and limp like a confused, wet, ugly kitten. “But seriously, what the fuck, Dresden?”

“I don't-” I started to answer while turning to the waiting LEOs, but was distracted by the sight of myself in the gore smeared underside of an overturned instrument tray. The black of my eyes had expanded to such a degree the only white visible were the moving specks that were more like floating embers than part of my sclera. Stars against a void of eternity. “This again?!”

“Again?” Mosely and Officer Carmichael spoke in bewildered unison, only to share a scowl before glaring at me, in the case of Carmichael, or Lula-May, in the case of Mosely. Also, in the case of Carmichael my hearing picked up a soft grunt of what might have been some variation of fudgemuppet bitches but as a mere mortal my hearing couldn't have possibly caught such a low utterance.

See? I can be diplomatic. When I want to.

Marie slipped around Georgie and entered the room on her fashionable heels, her expression an unflattering melding of revulsion and relief. “Granny! Granny Lulu! It's me, Marie! Can you hear me?!”

Lula-May craned her head toward her granddaughter before releasing a garbled sound that could've just as easily been spit getting caught in her throat as any kind of verbiage. The long mane of dull silver swayed as the baby vampire turned back to me and whined in askance. Thin lips trembled.

“...Grandma?” Marie took another step around a gnawed on arm that had been ripped from its torso before the taste of embalming fluid had turned Lulu off of her snack. As the dark haired woman stood with one arm in outstretched benediction, countenance melting into heartbreak, no one could deny the relation. They had the same sloping nose, and high forehead with a rounded hairline typically concealed by curled bangs and hairspray.

At the moment, for all the differences two generations make, they had the same forlorn, lost expression.

My chest ached, and it wasn't from the slowly normalizing pulse I remained intimately aware of despite no longer inhabiting the baby vampire. I backed away from Lula-May and focused on Carmichael. He might have had a beef with Mosely, and by extension me, but I had a feeling he was the immovable object we needed to meet Marie's unstoppable force. “Can you get Ms. Chantrelle out of here? I don't need a civilian distracting us.”

He shifted his weight to one side, hands on hips in such a way it looked natural but left his right hand perfectly positioned to draw his service pistol from the holster on his belt. “I can't leave a couple of  _consultants_ alone with a potential witness-”

Mosely, in his roll as former cop detective, rolled his eyes. “Vic's brain is swiss-fucking-cheese, even if she isn't about to eat ours just now. Any physical evidence left behind would have been contaminated when they cleaned up the corpse and put fucking make-up on it.”

“The Vic has a name.” Ms. Chantrelle snapped, pulling her arm to her chest with a instinctual jerk. Her eyes glistened, but whatever grief she'd felt had been fed to the flames of her own self-righteous anger. “Lulu simply needs a little care. She's confused. I won't have you treating her like some rabid dog to be put down. _I_ know the law – and as she is no longer an active and immediate threat to the populace at large Lulu is to be escorted to the Ogden district holding.”

“Officer Carmichael.” I stated, if you forgive the pun, deadpan.

“You are correct, Ma'am.” Georgie made a peace offering. “And I will personally see to it that your grandmother arrives safely at the vault. But it is late, and this is _still_ a crime scene. That you have been walking all over.”

The last comment actually made the woman pause, as if remembering that she had entered a room that looked like a bloody tornado had hit after being told repeatedly to stay out. Carmicheal ordered Georgie to stay with us as he escorted Marie outside for some fresh air. I waited till I could no longer hear soft tap of heels on laminate before nodding to the two remaining men. After a moment of hesitation Mosely returned the gesture and turned both his attention and his body back to our trapped grandmother, trusting me to remain professional if not, I was betting, all together sane.

“You do know how to win friends and influence people, don't you?” Lash's sighed with the tone of an exasperated mother. Or at least it was the kind of tone I'd overheard Charity use when trying and failing to talk Molly out of a piercing in places I was too old to legally think about.

“You don't actually think there's any evidence here, do you?” I heard Mosely ask Georgie.

“Not really, but then that's why we're in this shit sandwich.” Came the exhausted reply. “I am sorry about Carmichael. He's had a rough week.”

I popped a stick of spearmint gum in my mouth and let the flavor overpower the linger body and chemical odors of the mortuary. With a deep breath I settled my tired, frayed nerves and shaped my power. I thread my will through the knot of wind bundled at the small of Lula-May's back. Like fitting a key into a lock, I then gave my magic a mental twist and the binding came undone in a burst of released air. My duster ruffled in the sudden breeze, and Lula-May collapsed forward with a meaty thud. Her gummy mouth smiled, and her tongue played with a fang as though testing a loose tooth. Her eyes, no longer bright with power and madness, squinted up at naked blade I still held by my side. Did vampires need glasses?

The transformation usually improved the senses, but if your eyes were just that bad before getting turned...? When I had been using those eyes that didn't seem so bad, but I'd been looking with my power. So many connections... so very _many_ vampires...

“Later, Harry.” I scolded myself while flipping the machete in the air only to catch t it by the flat of the blade. I then waggled it handle first at Officer Georgie. “Forensics _now_ , forsorcery _later_.”

Mindful of the deleterious effects of faith on the undead I doused the werelight of my staff as well. Once that was done, Lula-May gathered her arms under herself and pushed up into a sitting position. I crouched low on the balls of my feet so that my ass hovered a few inches over my heels. I tried to smile.

“Lula-May? Lula-May McCormick?” I didn't use the name her granddaughter had for her, nor did I go for her married name. I used the Name that I'd felt more than heard when I'd been in her skin, the Name that was etched into her bones, and when I did so I whispered it with power and intent.

In a different world, with a different set of magical cop, using another being's Name might have gotten me killed if not on wizard probie. But Morgan was no Mountie and I had a job to do.

Something within Lula-May shifted as I spoke. Maybe it was my connection to the dead that alerted me to the change, or the bond we'd forced when she took my blood, but when I offered my hand and said her Name for a third time she answered by placing her own paper-soft palm in mine. I stood, knees popping, and she rose alongside me until the top of her head met my nose. For an undead terror, the lady was short.

Marie Chantrelle must of gotten her height from her mother's side of the family.

I led Lula-May over to a counter and lifted her by her hips, setting her atop the false granite like a child. Slowly, me and Georgie stripped the tattered remains of her burial garb off. Mosely was muttering to himself, still in disgruntled guard dog mode, and I didn't blame him. A newbie vamp letting herself be handled like a living doll wasn't normal. Even if everything was fine and dandy and she'd been raised by a proper master with all the rituals intact, instinct would have her tense. Hungry.

And she _was_ hungry. The taste of blood she'd gotten from me was just that – a taste. I could feel the echo of her hunger deep in my stomach, like I felt a phantom heart pumping behind mine, because for all metaphysical purposes at this moment I was her vampire master. She could draw strength from me and I could command her.

I put on a pair of milky white latex gloves when they were offered to me and we began our examination of the old lady. Mosely was entirely right when he told Carmichael any evidence would be contaminated, but I wasn't checking for hairs or blood or bruises from struggles. I started at her neck as it seemed the most obvious choice, sweeping back the tangled mane of her hair, and used my fingers to smooth wrinkled skin into temporary perfection.

“I'm not finding anything.” Georgie complained as he pushed a bare, sagging breast aside with her own gloved hands. “And I thought vampires healed when they rose.”

“They do.” I answered as I finished my assessment of Lula-May's neck. It was a perfect and unblemished as a liver-spotted ninety-year old's neck should be. I took a step back to think. The prime spots for biting were neck, inner thigh, and inner elbows. Three guesses why. “But they don't become perfect. Any defections -scars and moles and such- that were there before getting the bite that turns them stays.”

“You think she had been bitten before.” Mosely spoke up, and when I craned my neck around I could see him rubbing his chin in thought. “That this wasn't a random attack. An accident maybe? Or someone was worried about Lulu actually dying and didn't want to lose their sweet old meal ticket.”

“Could be. Vampires can make it so you don't remember them, so if she had a nightly visitor she might not have known, but even then she was old. You can't bounce back from blood loss at ninety like you can at nineteen.”

“True. Shit.” Mosely cussed and began to pace. “This doesn't make a bit of sense. Only motive I can think of is greed, what with those new inheritance laws. But if a vampire wanted to turn someone to get control of their assets why bugger off after the fact?”

Surprisingly, it was Georgie who answered. He turned Lula-May's right arm delicately, eyes pinched as he ran a finger over a scattering of freckles. “What if they didn't? Chicago is lousy with vampires, not that you'll see them on the streets much, and it's not like the Mob hasn't been known to outsource. You heard Marie. If it weren't for her morning phone calls no one would have known the lady was dead until she started to smell, which she wouldn't have, being a vamp and all.”

“You don't typically see centenarians getting turned, though. Unless what you need is a vampire no one would think to miss...” Mosely groaned. “I thought this freaky-ass bullshit was done with the Gedde cartel.”

“You'd think that, eh, priest?” Carmichael commented with a sneer as he stepped over a corpse. He had a long sleeved cotton dress balled up in his hand.

I tucked that little tidbit away in my mental Rolodex and grunted in satisfaction as I found a pair of discolorations on the left arm. “Hey, Mose. Do you have a ruler on you? Georgie?”

“I got a tape measure in my bag. Give me a second.” Mosely drawled, leaving the strangely sterile yet ruined room for his own kit of animator must-haves.

“What did you find?” Georgie leaned over and I showed off Lula-May's left arm. I pointed to the spidery varicose veins, trailing my finger along the soft skin of her inner elbow I came to pair of spots just a few shades darker than the rest of her skin on the side of her arm. Some vampires would bite hard enough to leave a traceable dental record behind. Those vampires were either unusually vicious or unusually stupid. Whoever bit Lulu was neither of those things. “Those could be from a needle.”

“Nope.” Mosely called from the hallway. “Lulu didn't give blood; at least not like that. And she hadn't been in the hospital for longer than an overnight stay since she was sixty.”

“So whoever was biting her,” Carmichael stated with a surprising lack of derision. I looked up, and he was staring with odd intensity at the bite mark. “Had been doing it in the same spot, and frequently enough to scar, but not so much as to leave her bedridden.”

“Weeks? Months?” Georgie asked. I shook my head and laid the measuring tape along Lula-May's skin. All four of us stared at the measurement. It was hard to get an exact number when all we had were inches and centimeters, but the distance between incisions seemed so much smaller against the tally marks of the tape measure. Whoever, whatever had bitten the woman had a small mouth.

Officer Georgie found a second set of puncture marks lower down on her right wrist, just as small as the first.

As Officer Carmichael stepped forward to help pull Lula-May's arms through the sleeves of the spare dress her granddaughter had provided I excused myself to get some fresh air. Then I fed Amber's tea cakes to the toilet.

* * *

The Ogden police district was as central a location you could get in Chicago without actually being the Central district. I ended up giving the keys to the Jeep to my fellow Executioner and riding in the back of the patrol car, hand in hand with Lula-May, to make sure she didn't snap and try to eat either of the officers. It was true that a metal grid separated the back seat from the front but I didn't have much hope of the metal staying anchored if the vampire put some effort into it.

From the way Carmichael had eyed the dents she'd made in the door at Mukasa & Sons I don't think he did either.

Chicago, I learned on the ride over to the 10th district, had dealt with Addison v Clarke in a very different manner than St. Louis. The vampires of St. Louis had mostly been left on their own after the Supreme Court held to the decision that they had as much of a right to exist as any other thinking, reasoning being. People were bitten, and as long as it was consensual and out of sight, what happened in dark dirty alleyways stayed there. Not so in Chicago and her surrounding suburbs.

Shortly after Addison v. Clarke a city ordinance had been passed that anyone who was known to have been transformed into a vampire or suspected of being transformed was to be brought to the holding vault of Ogden. There they would wait the three days or however long they had to wait to see if the corpse in question got up, and if they did start walking a mentor -a senior vampire- would help them get their hunger under control and guide them in their new world. It was sort of like a Big Brother Big Sister program, but for the undead, and as someone who worked with vampires on the regular a mentor was just a master with a shiny coating of PR glamour.

Theoretically, when someone was turned the vamp that did the deed would be the mentor waiting for them to wake to their new, nocturnal lives. Sometimes accidents happened, like Lula-May, and in that case if no one was already in the vault the CPD had a way to contact a representative for the Master of the City and have a mentor sent down. When Georgie said that, answering my inquiry about rogue vampire accidents and how it pertained to the current situation, Carmichael's knuckles on the steering wheel went white.

I think if I had been holding anything other than Lula-May's hand my knuckles would have gone white, too.

I left Lula-May resting on a stuffed couch with an unlucky rabbit kicking futilely in her mouth. The door shut behind me and I could hear the whirl of electronic locks turning and bolts as thick as my wrist sliding into place. I pressed against the door, the metal cool even through my duster, and stared at the lights in the ceiling.

“...you okay?” The secretary that had led us down to the vault asked. She was cute in her cornflower blue button-up and navy skirt, but she had a weariness around her eyes that make-up couldn't cover.

“Why is everyone asking me that?” I groaned, at least my eyes had gone back to normal on the drive over, and then stirred the air with a gesture. “I'm fine. It's just been a long night. Sorry.”

“Are you going to be good to come back tomorrow night?” Carmichael asked from where he was watching the CCTV footage from inside the vault. Lula-May was still on the couch, but she was picking at the now dead rabbit in a way that would require another change of clothes. Animals worked as a temporary measure, but vampires really needed to feed from humans if they didn't want to starve themselves.

“If you're paying,” I drawled, pushing off from the vault door. “Why? I was under the impression I was just needed to get her calm, once the... mentor... gets here she'll be his problem.”

Meaning he would override Jean-Claude's blood oath with his own.

Carmichael grunted an affirmative, but he it took a bit longer for him to tear his gaze from the monitor and explain. “Sheriff wants to interview the witness without any third parties present. I'm familiar enough with procedure to know the older vamps usually start their thing before the newbies wake up – if you got here before sunset, could you get Mrs. Chantrelle talking again?”

Honestly, I'd been hoping to head home after a nice nap in a motel. I raised a hand to my head in an effort to forestall the oncoming deprivation headache, wrinkled my nose at the slick remains of the potion I'd forgotten to wipe off, and wobbled my clean hand in a so-so gesture. “Maybe. I don't know. I've never done this before. I can keep her from going revenant again, but that's all I can promise.”

“Typical.” He crossed his arms and turned to the secretary, who had been making herself part of the furniture. She jumped as he loomed over her, even though she was nearly as tall as he was. “So don't call in with HQ or whoever it is that makes the call. We got a mentor right here. And this one has a heartbeat.”

“I'm sorry, but that's not my decision. Detective Maucelli-”

“Has not been invited into this case, which is still open and being handled by DuPage County. If it were up to me, I'd have thrown the witness in a meat-locker and called it a night.”

“Carmichael!” Georgie hissed, very much aware that the two of them were far from their usual jurisdiction. That, and it was rude. My personal not-Jesus clucked her tongue with a mutter of amateur. Who she was referring too, I wasn't sure.

Carmichael closed his eyes and tilted his head up to the lights. His mouth moved in unintelligible monosyllables. Counting, I assumed. “Yes. I apologize. It has been a long night and we all need some sleep. Executioner Dresden will be back this evening to assist the new vampire – we suspect it was an unlawful turning and as such would dislike the victim being exposed to her attackers before we can be sure of their innocence.”

The cop must have hit on a keyword, because the woman nodded and opened up a window on the computer and began typing. “Well then, you should have said. Unfortunately, the Master has been framed for crimes in the past. I'll note that her Mentor is... Mrs. Blake?”

Recognition floated through her blue eyes like storm clouds across a sky. Along with a healthy helping of suspicion.

“Dresden. Harry, ah, Harriet Dresden.” I corrected, and after a few more taps of the keyboard we left. I listened to the sound of my staff, the steady plod of wood against tile. Carmichael took the lead and I walked just behind him with Georgie beside me. Georgie, I idly noticed, looked extremely uncomfortable and didn't start to relax until we turned a corner into the station lobby. Through the glass doors I could see Mosely's bulk perched on the guardrail of the stairs outside, a cigarette dangling from between his fingers.

He'd gone into the station briefly to vouch for me at the front desk, then retreated outside while we dropped off Lula-May. The portly man hopped off his impromptu balance beam as we left the building, dropping his cigarette to the ground only to smear carbon ash across the cement and completely ignore the trash can/ash tray that was two feet to his left.

My eyebrows rose at the action, and he smiled. It was odd on him, the kind of expression that was so honest it was full of shit. “Any trouble?”

“Not particularly.” I shrugged and gestured to our former escorts as they climbed into their patrol car and drove home. I glanced at the sky, and stars that were fading from light pollution that was not wholly city generated. “They want me to come back later, see if I can wake her with a brain in addition to the heart.”

“Well, you've got courage to spare.” Mosely yawned and we wobbled down the short flight of stairs that smoothed into a parking lot. Mosely had parked my jeep a little way's next to his own car, something short and long and an unfortunate shade of green. “Gotta say, I haven't even heard of an animator doing the kind of shit you pulled tonight – last night? Does it count as jet lag if you don't get off the ground?”

A delirious little laugh burst from my chest; he grinned and continued. “I wouldn't mind tagging along for the next run. Not that I'm not a fan of Lulu, she was a nice old lady and her quiche's will always have a place in my heart, but anything that doesn't involve chickens is too cool to pass up.”

“Chickens?”

He grimaced, then shrugged. “It's always with the chickens. Or goats. Or hornless goats. I thought about going into the animating thing full time, you know, but – _chickens_. We got a rare enough talent even I could do something with it, but I'd rather just enjoy the inbuilt spidey sense than deal with the sacrifices for me to raise a person.”

“I get that.” I nodded. “Blood is bad enough, but feathers? Almost as bad as glitter.”

“Don't forget the bird shit.”

“Mm-hmm.” I hummed agreement and unlocked the Jeep, checking to make sure my bag was in the back. Mosely was standing by his own door, though he hadn't unlocked it yet. Yeah, we were parked in front of a police station but this was Chicago. You _locked your fucking cars_ before leaving them.

“So, Dresden? Harry.”

“Yeah?” I pulled the driver side door open and put one boot on the foot rail.

“You know where you're staying tonight? I could come pick you up, before the raising? Can't find a decent beignét anywhere in the city but there's a little café I know that serves a damn fine muffuletta.”

I grinned, elation filling me as the word beignet filled that mysterious hole labeled French/Creole in the mysterious accent bingo card I'd been keeping. He was from New Orléans, and had tried to train himself out of the French Quarter, but not quite succeeded. At least, not when faced with someone who had one of the original French immigrants on mental speed dial.

As quick as it came the realization passed, and my grin crashed into a frown.

Mosely was asking me on a date. Other than the fact that I was pretty sure Jean-Claude will kill anyone physical enough for his Human-Servant, being me, to get frisky with Mosely just wasn't my type. Sure, he had some curves but... he didn't have the right equipment.

While my brain was decided to take a page out of Bob's playbook and debate the difference between sacks of bouncing flesh strapped to a woman's chest and those same bosoms on a man, my mouth blurted: “I'm a taco guy, myself.”

“Mexican...?” Mosely trailed off before the mental light came on just as my cheeks decided to turn my face into a stop sign. “Oh. OH. Damn.”

His shoulders slumped and I hastily climbed into my wrangler, tucking my duster out of the way of the door before pulling it shut. He was walking around to the door on his side, rubbing the back of his neck when I turned the key in the ignition. My Jeep coughed, sputtered. I turned the key again, just in case. Mosely hit the unlock sigil on his key fob, watched the complete lack of reaction in his vehicle, and with an glaring eyes smashed the emergency horn button.

The resounding cacophony of beeps, whistles, and alarms from the nearest ten cars that were not his own drowned out the sound of my own engine giving one last valiant, bone rattling cough before dying entirely. Still blushing, I slid out of my seat and grabbed my bag from the back. Then I took my car keys from the ring and nestled them between the fuel cap and the flippy door thing. I'd call a tow service in the morning.

I shuffled over the other practitioner as he flipped off some civic servants that had come out to turn off their car alarms. “So... is that offer of a ride still open?”

 


	5. Confessions of a Stone Age Cave-Man

I proceeded down North West Avenue, the Blue Beetle passing all the little shops and salons and hole-in-the-wall churches I remembered from our monthly (cash flow permitting) movie night, but I wasn't awake. Embarrassingly enough, it didn't occur to me to question the reality of my surroundings until the lack of wooden slats numbing my ass registered. The Blue Beetle itself was long gone, but not through any fault of its own.

It had been with me in many a supernatural tussle, and had borne and scars of those battle like a champ. The old Volkswagen lost the uniform blue shell of its namesake shortly after I'd bought it, but retained the unmistakable character of a surly yet loyal tomcat. I had never lost it in a parking garage, or to some hooligans looking to boost a radio for pocket money. Still, the Beetle's interior had never quite recovered from a disagreement with a group of mold demons and I'd spent a good couple of years feeling the difference. As a PI with a rather narrow clientele I'd never had quite enough money to keep the Beetle both functioning _and_ presentable.

“Sort of like how you keep yourself, right?” At the sound of my own voice, maybe with an edge of something I didn't want to call dangerous but if the goatee fits, my whole body shivered in startled surprise and I slammed on the brakes. The world jerked to a stop. People shaped blurs froze mid-step on the sidewalk, vehicles paused with cartoonish after images trailing behind them, and a dancing hot-dog in a baseball uniform waved its arms in panic where it hovered in the air with its heels locked together. “But it isn't funding that's your deficit, there.”

I twisted in the well padded driver's seat to face a more expensively dressed version of myself. The other Harry leaned back with the assistance of impossible dream physics and propped his spit-shone eel skin boots on the Beetle's dashboard. His grin was, I am not ashamed to say, rather dashing even if it didn't reach his eyes. I gave him a squint-eyed glare in return, pressing my back into the driver's side door and crossing my arms. “So says Mr. Monochrome.”

Dark!Harry rolled his eyes and traced patterns on the window. I faintly recognized them as runes. Some I'd learned under my mentors, some I'd adapted from pop culture for... reasons. “Black-on-Black is a classic. Just ask Johnny Cash.”

“I wasn't aware we were Country music fans.”

“Sweetie, there is a lot you aren't aware of.”

I didn't refute the statement, instead I affected a slow, southern drawl: “Them's fightin words.” I flexed my fingers along with my annoyance at his intrusion, enjoying the crackling sound of popping knuckles mixed with lightning. Flickers of white light filled the little car, casting a sickly pallor over my unfairly fashionable twin.

“You'd just end up hurting yourself, but that's nothing new.” The grin my darker self was wearing stretched into a smirk as he reached out with his left arm, my shielding arm, palm up and fingers spread. The crinkling energy fled from me, forming into a vague bird shape as it took to the air. Dresden dark and dreaming cooed at the the electric scribble chirping in his palm. A black leather glove that appeared to absorb light traced down the non-existent back of the bird. The traitor preened.

I huffed, and turned to face front. As much as I hated it the fact was my subconscious, my id, my primal instinct or whatever new term the shrinks had thought up for him was right. Most of the time. I shifted gears and the world rocked back into motion, sliding by in a vague blur as we continued driving down the dreamscape. I watched as traffic lights that had been alternating blue and purple switched to green at the Beetle's approach. Best to bite the bullet. “What are you doing here? No one is trying to kill me.”

Or attack through more exotic means, mentally and otherwise, went unsaid but understood.

“Give it time.” The other Harry clenched his gloved fingers shut so fast the figment cradled in his palm couldn't even chirp alarm before intangible bones snapped like twigs. “I have faith in our abilities, if not our nature, to get us out of as many scraps as you get us into. And speaking of faith, we need to talk about Lash.”

I scratched at the roguishly handsome five o'clock shadow on my chin and tried to remember where I had been going before my hitchhiker announced himself. There was subtle split between dream-me and lucid dream-me that is oddly similar to the paradigm shift that happened between the states of sober and drunk. Decisions that were perfectly logical the night before are revealed in all their nonsensical glory the next day when your new best friend comes over to check on you and discovers a freezer full of socks when she goes to make an ice pack. “What?”

“Don't be stupid. You heard me. I know because I heard me.” He swung his feet off the dashboard and brushed dust off the wood paneling with a softness I wasn't used to seeing in my id. The passenger chair swiveled, not a function in the original Volkswagen, and he leaned toward me with a hand braced against each respective knee. Dark eyes gleamed, and the grin was gone. “I'll put it as simply as I can: Stop abusing Lash.”

The Beetle dissolved around us in that abrupt change of circumstance that the One only wished he could accomplish. I stood, and instead of the safe pavement of Chicago city streets the grass of Wrigley Field crunched beneath my feet. My staff was in my hand, but I didn't remember summoning it. Then again, a wizard's staff was more than a good sized chunk of wood. It was an extension of their will, and in a dream all we were was will be it subconscious, conscious, id, ego, superego.

When everything flesh and blood and bone was stripped away, this was me. Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. A man in cowboy boots and duster, staff in hand, about to duel himself at high noon in a baseball field.

That probably doesn't speak well for my mental health.

Judging by the way tall, dark, and insulting had one eyebrow hiked he was not impressed. He also wasn't making any move to attack me. Point in the not actually being suicidal column? I took a breath; forced myself to stop and think instead of react.

I'll be the first to admit I'm not good boyfriend material. My first love was like a sister to me -unpack that at your own peril- and I spent over a decade pretending I'd killed her. My second steady girlfriend, a reporter for the _Arcane_ , left me after being infected with Red Court blood. We'd fucked since, once, and in hindsight a dark part of me has wondered if that wasn't part of a ploy to get me on board her plan to steal a shroud. Using each other was the norm for us. Her for stories. Me for human contact.

I'd been prepared to marry her, till-death-do-us-part, but I hadn't been willing to share my world with her. Not fully. She was a mortal, vulnerable, and despite her desire and passion to learn and _know_ that had drawn us together... I'd decided ignorance would keep her safe. But she didn't want safe, and I failed her.

Now Susan was part of my world but not my life. Considering the current state of affairs, she was arguably more a part of my world than I was.

I would never know if she gave into the blood lust and became a vampire, or died fighting them. The not knowing hurt, in some undefinable way, and maybe that was the point.

I licked my chapped lips, a sun with a child's face beating down on the stadium with such single-minded intensity the air visibly boiled. The last woman I had seriously considered starting a relationship with had turned out to be a figment of a fallen angel. A shadow of a shadow. Lash was plugged directly into my brain. She could see what I saw, feel what I felt, and know what I was thinking. Know exactly what to say to make me feel what she wanted. For a being modeled after a creature known as the Temptress, the Webweaver, I'd be stupid to take anything she said at face value. She would lie to me, I knew, if she thought it was better or more efficient that I don't know.

But even if I was only talking to thin air, Lash was there. Unlike Elaine. Unlike Susan. She _couldn't_ leave me, and if I died she died, so in a twisted way that made her... safe. And I loved her for that. Just like the Nega!Harry standing across from me.

“I'm not.” I defended, but it was weak, and the heat on the back of my neck was like a chastisement. “I would _never_.”

“You don't mean to.” The other conceded with a nod, and a few dark strands of hair that had been combed back fell artfully forward. He huffed, a frustrated puff of air as he began to tread a path around home plate and made me wonder if my house was made of straw or sticks. “And she loves us, for some quite literal ungodly reason, she does. She didn't have to help us all those times, she could have let you flounder like a confused monkey until it was Angel-Cake or Death, but she didn't. She _didn't_.”

“It helped her too.” I countered with not a clue to where this inner monologue was going. It was weird seeing him like this, and I wanted it to stop. He was supposed to be cool, confident, a warlock without a cause. “If I had died she would have died, and if I called the coin...”

I didn't actually know. Best guess Lash would be reabsorbed into Lasciel and cease to exist.

Damned if you do. Damned if you don't. Fallen Angels, am I right?

The other Harry made a sweeping gesture as though clearing a table. “Little Chicago.”

“What about it?”

“Do you remember what Bob said? The first time we used it?”

“Not exactly...” But now that I was thinking about it, Bob had been convinced a cities' worth of thaumatergic links, tangled as they were with the modeled ley lines, should have exploded in my face. But someone had fixed it. Someone, Bob had said, who wasn't me.

Which meant someone had gotten past my wards without setting them off. Which meant that someone had to be incredibly skilled _and_ incredibly powerful. A good portion of those wards had been developed to deter the likes of my godmother back when I still thought she wanted to make me her personal pet. The woof-woof kind. Those wards wouldn't have stopped the Leansidhe, at least not when she still held my debt, but they would have done some damage and been loud about it.

Even in a dream where I didn't need to breathe if I didn't want to, I suddenly felt short of breath. The air was stifling. Why _hadn't_ I considered the possibilities before? The information had been disturbing, and bore looking into if only to plug the obvious hole in my wards, but I'd been trying to find Molly and then training her on top of my work as a warden... I forgot about it. Ignoring the benevolence of the act, I had forgotten that something had come into my _home,_ bypassed the _wards_ and the _threshold,_ and messed with my _magic_.

Fucked with my memory, maybe. My _mind_. Played me like a fucking puppet on lines of spider silk.

Love _hurts_.

“Stop!” The other Harry shouted in my face, his own expression a pinched mask of exertion as he crossed the distance between us with a thought and grabbed at my wrist before I could direct the fireball. I gnashed my teeth kicked him in the shins, hard. For all I knew he wasn't me, either. “It's not what you're thinking! Lash didn't do it! _I_ did! That's why it never bothered you, because deep down, where _I_ live, you knew it wasn't anything to worry about!”

The confession made about as much sense as Worcestershire sauce on rice pudding.

My elbow found soft flesh, he grunted, and then swept my legs out from under me in a move Murphy had showed me again and again but I'd never been able to pull off properly. I landed on my shoulder, though, and tangled our long legs together to bring him down to my level. I clambered on top and raised my fist, but that was my face, and beneath the goatee was an all too familiar expression. Grief.

“Yes, she saw what was happening. Yes, she begged us not to use Little Chicago. You didn't listen. _I_ did. That's my job – to look out for the threats you don't see. Or refuse to see. You don't listen to her, you care, but you don't listen. You don't treat her like a person.” It was hard to breathe. Light bore down like lead. My selfish self was looking up at me, assessing. Fire roared in my ears. “She's a tool. A comfort object. Familiar, in a world of strange things. And once you get comfortable with the now... you'll put her back in her mental box, pulling her out only when convenient, because you'll tell yourself she's dangerous. Either because you can't afford to rely on a crutch, or because of where she came from. And she'll let you. She'll die for you. Because she loves you.

“You neglectful son-of-a-bitch.” He finished, and I slowly raised my hand to my face. The space around us had become viscous, the air blurry. My eyes were damp.

“T-That's not... true. I love her. I love Lash.”

He stared up at me, with weak trails of water escaping the corners of his own eyes, but didn't say anything else. It was raining at Wrigley Field. I climbed off of my other self and sat on the grass, legs curled up to my chest. I propped my chin on my knees. Rubbed at my eye with the fat heel of my palm.

I loved her, didn't I? I wasn't _using_ her. Lash has offered me the power to vanquish my enemies, the kind that would make an army of nightmares think twice, and all it would cost me was my soul. I'd turned that down – my life was already in a Farie Queen's pocket. Even I'd been so inclined, what with the war on, I hadn't been willing to risk my death, too.

Little things, though, could be helpful and were given freely. Like understanding what the enemy is saying to give me an edge of warning, or putting a little extra fue in my go. Every seduction starts with small touches. Little things. Good intentions.

And what was hell paved with, again?

No guy wants their girl to be riding shotgun twenty-four seven in his life, the term man-cave came about for a reason, and yet... part of me wondered how much was Lash loving me back, how much of her was capable of love, and how much was her wanting to turn me to her own designs. Whatever those may be. Her titles included the Temptress. The Seducer. But Lash was not Lasciel; if a person is a compilation of thought and experience then she'd become a different entity the moment she budded from Lasciel and attached to me. I'd been the one to tell _her_ that. And yet, despite the new, horizontal dynamics to our relationship as host and angel I had been maintaining the distance between us.

Reducing my girlfriend to brief flickers of emotion and faint echoes of sound unless summoned, I was still thinking of Lash as the proverbial devil on my shoulder. Habit?

“She isn't, you know.” A hand squeezed my shoulder. Maybe he was the devil, and Lash the angel? Darth Lord Dresden looked beyond the rising stands to a sunset of deep purples and reds that made the sky look like one big bruise. He made a face, then, like he'd just seen caught a whiff of something foul. “Fallen. Ask her when you wake up, and you should wake up. It is unseemly for powerful wizards to piss themselves, especially after we avoided doing such in front of the Erlking.”

“Wha-” I didn't get to finish questioning him. Instead, I woke up to sore muscles and with a mouth full of mothballs. The hooks on my bra were digging into my back, causing the sweat damp skin to itch. I could feel gritty waste under my fingertips as I rubbed at my eyes, turning away from the damp spot on the pillow. My bladder was screaming at me, reminding me that I hadn't stopped to empty the tank since St. Louis. I'd been too tired after Mosely dropped me off at a nearby Motel 6 to do much beside argue my non-terrorist status with the front desk (even I can admit a bag full of magic paraphernalia and weapons looks sketchy) and pass out. It was a decision I was regretting now.

The bed wasn't the most comfortable to begin with, but it wasn't the worst. I couldn't say if housekeeping had over-starched the sheets as I hadn't bothered getting between them and I hadn't bothered turning up the air conditioner in case ambient magic wrecked it. My legs were tangled in the thin top blanket, the knitted cover clinging to the fabric of my slacks like cat hair to a sweater. After several kicks to dislodge the woolen limpet I staggered over to the bathroom, unbuttoning my shirt as I went.

A shimmy and more kicks resulted in a pair of flying pants, and I managed to finish the most pressing business with only minor regret. Fun fact: women can pee standing up. Unfortunately, without the appropriate nozzle they can't aim worth a damn, which makes pissing into a toilet almost impossible. So I sat and rubbed my forehead, thinking. Then I sighed when the sticky remains of the séance potion came off on my fingers.

It was probably all over the pillow, too.

The cleaning lady was going to kill me.

I leaned back against the cold porcelain of the toilet tank, face tilted to the ceiling. “Fuck.” Then for good measure. “Fuck, fuckity, fuck fuck.”

I stood and tousled my hair, nails scratching soothingly against my scalp. Then I turned on the shower and waited for steam to fill the small room. I stepped under the shower spray and sighed, letting the stream of liquid heat beat back all the accumulated aches and stresses from the power high of the night before.

Lash has this mental trick that made the water feel as though was hot when it wasn't. Self-delusion at its best.

I lathered up a washcloth with the tiny cake of complementary soap. It smelled like coconuts. I wondered if Lash liked Monty-Python.

“Problems are like pant legs, Dresden. You gotta deal with them one at a time.”

* * *

 

It turned out I had slept through the motel's complementary breakfast, but that wasn't a surprise. Two in the afternoon was late even for those that catered to the brunch crowd. I got some recommendations for restaurants and car repair from the youth manning the check-in desk, a cup of hot but stale coffee from the lounge, and headed out to face the day in the spare pair of sweatpants, comfy tee, and my bulletproof duster. Such a combo was as far from the height of fashion as I could get, and my inner self was probably hitting his head against a wall, but the clothes had been packed on the off chance an arterial blood spray went wide. Not exactly business attire.

The gray slacks and red button-up I'd unthinkingly slept in had been hastily rinsed in the bathroom sink and left hanging in the shower. Hopefully, they wouldn't stain. Hopefully, we'd get answers tonight and I'd be able to go home.

Today, however, I had a craving for runny eggs and bacon, but the number of diners that were still serving them at this hour were slim. I didn't mind the hike to the Denny's as it gave me a chance to stretch my legs and clear my head. It was nice to have a clear, simple goal and not think about anything but putting one foot in front of the other as I made my way to breakfast.

Out of the forest of gleaming sky scrapers and rail lines, the hallmarks of urban life gradually gave way to buildings that were long rather than tall. Single story brick buildings, painted and not, red and not, lined the street. Occasionally one broke the mold with additional levels or franchise specific architecture. I sipped at the coffee as I followed the sidewalk, my freshly washed hair drying into soft curls in the open air. The trip was pleasantly quiet, silence interrupted only by birdsong and the near silent dash of speeding vehicles. I didn't know if the lack of catcalls was a result of my clothing choice, the big phallic fuck-off object I was keeping the time with, or the simple courtesy of people having better things to do than whistle at pedestrians.

I walked. I sipped. I considered. A patina encrusted truck rumbled past, exhaust escaping into the sky like the ashes of a burnt sacrifice. Across the street in all its retro-sixties glory metal gleamed silver in the afternoon sun. My eyes watered, unprotected as they were from the reflected light. My mouth watered in pavlovian response to the drifting scent of bacon grease and other delicious things. My stomach yawned, empty and eager to be filled.

At the first break in traffic, completely ignoring the orange hand buzzing by the crosswalk, I darted across the street as a small, black blur. The door to the Denny's opened suddenly, and I had to hop backward on one foot to avoid being trampled by the family of four that was exiting the diner.

“Sorry, Miss.” The man of the group apologized, the surprised expression on his face souring into thinly veiled suspicion as he held the door open for me. “Didn't see you there.”

“'S fine.” I bit my tongue and resisted the urge to apologize in turn as his wife hiked her baby higher in her arms while taking an obvious route around me, stepping over the woodchip covered plot of earth that circled the store. A preteen ignored all of us ridiculous adults as his thumbs worked over the beeping greenish brick in his hands. Retro- for him.

The outer door swung shut behind me, blocking out a rushed feminine whisper on the evils of the inner-city, drugs, and godlessness. As I tugged open the inner glass and metal door cold, recycled air greeted me like an old lover. So did the lingering sweetness of syrups and too many glasses of cornsyurp and sweet tea.

I smiled at the hostess sitting behind the podium. She greeted me with the same. “Would you like a table or the bar?”

I planted my staff and tilted my head, using the pressure to scratch at an itch on the side. “Actually, can I get a booth?”

She looked down at the map on her podium, tucked a few strands of dirty blonde hair behind her ear, and looked back up at me with that same pleasant smile. Her hand hovered over the stack of menus. “Certainly! Are you expecting anyone else?”

“Just me, today.”

“Alright, if you would follow me?”

I did. The booth she'd picked was toward the back, a stone's throw from the restrooms, and as far from the rest of the Denny's patrons as I could sit without being banished into the smoking area. Wedging my staff between the bolted table and perfectly stuffed booth seating, I traded the half-empty Motel 6 embossed coffee cup for a menu. I knew what I wanted, of course, but it didn't hurt to look.

...since when did Denny's put peanut butter on top of their pancakes? And chocolate chips?! White chocolate?! White chocolate isn't chocolate! It is condensed sacrilege!

I grimaced and flipped the laminated sheet over, preferring to stare at the empty seat across from me rather than the brightly advertised blasphemy.  Doing so wasn't any less painful, just in a different way. I leaned forward letting the table support my weight, and propped chin in palm, elbow on table. Three tiny pots of syrup stood in a wire basket at the end of the table. They were brown, blackish, and a red with bits of something floating in it.

Probably strawberries.

“Lash?” I muttered, words muffled by the weight of jaw against palm. “What do you think?”

I resolutely did not take my gaze from the empty seat. It was as close to an invitation as I could give. Anything else would be a summons; the landlord demanding rent of his tenant and failure to pay would see her kicked back to her mother's basement. Which was probably on fire and violating all the health codes. All of them.

Between one utterly stupid thought and the next, the booth was occupied. Lash announced herself with a dramatic flutter of wings that sounded like an entire flock of startled pigeons. Six massive wings that followed mind breaking geometries folded against her back as she settled, leather armor squeaking cutely against the pleather of the booth. Sun bleached brown bangs had been worked into braids revealing a dash of freckles and sparkling eyes. Today, her eyes were the pale green of polished jade.

Previously, they had almost always been presented as brilliant and blue. Sometimes darker, sometimes lighter, but blue.

For a moment, I wondered why she'd stopped that.

The angel was looking around the small restaurant, gaze lingering on an ancient movie poster for _Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman_. Her wings quivered giving away her amusement. She folded her hands demurely into her lap, but one corner of her lips curled upward with pure sass.  Something low in my belly warmed with want, and it wasn't for food. “Would you like me to check for food poisoning, Harry?”

“They're cheap,” My heart started skipping rope. “But not that cheap. I was actually wondering... what kind of syrup you like?”

My empty hand gestured toward the little condiment station helpfully. Lash looked at it, and the follow up shrug was like a wave breaking along the stadium of her feathers. “I can not say if I have a preference. I've never tried it.”

“But, aren't you like... big-bang theory old? Not that you look a day over thirty, of course. I wouldn't have thought maple, at least, was a new thing...” The skin between my eyebrows tensed.

“My maker was old, yes, but she fell long before man took to cultivating anything but raw grain and charred meat. The time between... it is hard to describe. Regardless, any of her memories I inherited are just that. Memories. And nothing compares to the absolute peace of Heaven's Mana or excruciating ecstasys of Hell's Ambrosia.”

“Sounds like you angels knew how to party.”

“Well, the Messiah did sublimate some truly exceptional brews while he walked the earth. Or so I was told.” The quirky, sexy smile was back. “If Lasciel's host had tried to drink what little was saved it would have burned holes straight through his mouth and irredeemably poisoned his blood. I do not know the specifics the Christ child used for the transmutation, but I can guess, and the fires of creation are something no fallen can bare to touch. Such was the price for their tie to the world.”

I swallowed, and was reminded of my darker double's final words. The thought was derailed by the zombie like utterance of my server, a man with a ponytail and a missing name tag. He was eyeing Lash's seat like it was on fire and he didn't know if he was supposed to call 911 or start hauling buckets.

“Yes?” I prompted. Then I ordered. He slipped his notepad into the pocket of his half apron and bustled off to retrieve my Coke and send my request to the kitchen. I watched him go, his steps quicker than necessary for the post-lunch rush, before returning my attention to Lash. She had scooted closer to the glass bottles, running her finger over the sticky remains on poorly closed latches.

I ran my tongue behind my teeth, watching her. She wasn't really there, but I'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. Sunlight filtered through the window causing the odd thread of brown to gleam golden as though someone had spun tinsel through her hair. She picked up the brown and black bottles, one in each hand. “Do you prefer Maple or Wildberry, my host?”

That included blackberries, right? “Wild-”

Or, no. I paused, mouth hanging open around the unfinished word. Berries were okay, but if I was going to be putting it on my pancakes I wanted Maple. I didn't like how tiny seeds, no matter how well strained the dish, tended to get caught in my teeth and distract from the fluffy flapjacks.

Lash nodded anyway, and put the syrup containers back in place as though their removal hadn't been an incredibly advanced manipulation of my perception. “Then I shall leave you to your meal, Harry, should you require my-”

“Don't go!” I lunged across the table, my hand grasping the warm leather of an intricately worked bracer. Stars above, no matter what she chose to look like, Lash was beautiful. The sum was greater than the parts of the whole, parts of a hundred different women stitched together to best please _me_. Was it a manipulation? Most definitely. But no more than any other woman who had to put on her face before starting the day.

Lash just had a bigger make-up budget than the average Hollywood starlet.

“Beloved?”

The word hurt. I gave her my best smile, though it might have wobbled a little. “Stay. Please. Sex is great, the sex is _wonderful_ , but... that's not something a relationship should be based on.” I should know. I'd had two of them collapse around my ears based on exactly that. My sister in all but blood. My would-be fiancé. “And I want us to have time together that isn't spent trying to out think an enemy or not thinking at all. Tell me something that you like, Lash. Something that is just you. Please?”

In the silence that followed the server returned and dropped my drink off. He stared at my arm stretched across the table, hand grasping what to him was unseen, and when I finally sat back I noticed he'd left five straws behind instead of the one. I tore the paper wrapping off of one and slipped the rest into my coat pocket.

Finally, Lash spoke. “Music.”

“Music?”

“I remember the Music of the Spheres, though I have never walked those Hallowed Halls. Every living thing creates a song of its own, each heartbeat a rhythm that resounds out to those who can hear it, mixing and blending into a grand symphony. This song surrounds us, penetrates us, binds reality together.” As Lash spoke, her eyes gleamed, and her words took on an demonstrative cadence.

“Did you just make a Star Wars reference?” Suddenly, I wanted to kiss her.

“Did I?” She sing-songed, knuckles wrapping against the table. Dun. Dun. Dun. Dun, dundun. Dun, dundun. “It is apt. Though the Song is less a Force and more of a Flow. It is hard to truly understand without standing in Heaven, where you can feel every fiber of one's essence vibrating in synchronicity and every word is sung.”

“Oh. Oh, God.” I snorted into my Coke, the bubble of air causing a splash of soda over the lip of the glass, as so many little things lined up to come to the most ridiculous conclusion.  After last night, it was a laugh I had needed.

“Harry?” Lash questioned, though the echo of my amusement was written in the set of her shoulders, her relaxed expression.

“Big G's house is one big concert hall, isn't it? That's why Shiro got Christianized during the Elvis concert, and Michael picked up Amoracchius during... Woodstock, I think?”

Her lips were pick, glossy, and at odds with the roman themed armor she wore. She gave me a closed-mouth grin, humming deep in her throat, and I wanted to taste those lips. I wanted to taste her, but I meant what I'd said. It wasn't even about my insecurities when it came to my own female attributes. I simply wanted to do something for Lash.

She wasn't a tool, or my call-back girl. But she was mine.

“Come on.” I slid out of the booth and offered my hand to assist her from the red and black seat. We weaved through a small ocean of tables and chairs until arriving at an antique jukebox. It was boxy; lacking the glowing, cathedral like curving shape of the iconic 50's diner experience, but it worked. It also only played vinyl, so I wasn't likely to break it if we got a little enthusiastic. Together we examined the song selection.

Most of it was golden oldies, but someone had made an effort to add a few modern tracks to the playlist. I pressed the button and behind the glass plastic pages flipped with a mechanical whirl. Lash made an excited sound, and I saw her tap at an entry under a country music selection judging by the artists. “I didn't know they had put the poem to instrumentation. It is one of my favorites.”

“Oh, yeah. It's a nice one. Tragic, but nice.” Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him, with her death. My mind flashed back to the Raith Deeps, and years of silence when I'd thought her dead. “I didn't know Johnny Cash had done a cover of it. Maybe he only did one here?”

“A first for the both of us, then?” Her hand drifted down, a pressure on my hip as fingertips teased my shirt up. I kissed her then, quick, a brush of my lips against a pale shoulder, and fumbled with my change purse to put a dime in the slot.

We got back to my table just as the machine began to play and a waitress with her hair pulled back into a high ponytail arrived with my Grandslam. I slid back into my spot, taking my plate from the new girl as I did so, and cocked my head to the side as the twang of Willie Nelson filled the diner. “That is _not_ Noyes' poem.”

“No.” Lash said, cuddled up to my side. One moment she'd been standing at the foot of the table, gaze on the empty booth seat opposite me, the next she'd vanished to reappear seated beside me. “But it is very _you_ , dear host. A pleasant surprise.”

“Can I get you anything else?” The new server, Ashley, asked cheerfully. I cut into my eggs and watched dark yellow bleed onto the plate.

“Nope!” I popped the P, then popped some yolk covered hashbrowns in my mouth. She turned to go and I hastily shoved the food into the pocket of my cheek. “Actually, can I get some of those kiddie crayons? I don't need the activity sheet, though.”

“Uh, sure thing. Be back in a mo!” She gave me finger guns and waltzed off toward the welcome podium.

I rifled through the depths of my pockets and found the copy of Amber's containment circle, a little wrinkled from the drive and the night but perfectly legible. I swallowed my eggs and smoothed out the paper. Lash's chin was hooked over my shoulder, her wings vibrating as she recognized designs meant to hold archangels in place. I wrapped my arm around her waist and gestured with a stiff piece of well cooked bacon.

We talked shop for the rest of the meal. Just talked.

* * *

 

I found out from our replacement server as I was separating fives from the wad of cash I kept on me (at least it wasn't all twenties, then I'd be mistaken for a drug dealer or so Zane claimed) that nameless guy was new and convinced I had been talking to a ghost. The more veteran staff had a bet going on if I was vanilla crazy, a psychic medium, an animator, or just had all my other stuff in the wash. As she counted out the change I informed Ashley that animating was only a hobby; I was actually a professional cat sitter.

Lash snickered, fingers wound in mine, as we left the Denny's and began the trek back to the motel. Mosely had promised to pick me up later in the evening for the trip to back to the Ogden police station, but there were plenty of other things I needed to do between now and then. Firstly, get up to my room and call the number of the mechanic that I got this morning to arrange a tow. Secondly, call the house and make sure Vivian knew to reschedule appointments for the next few days. There weren't many, but I didn't know how long DuPage was going to be footing the bill, and if it was much longer I was going to need to stop in a superstore and get some new underthings at the very least.

Did Motel 6 have a laundry service?

“Hmm.” Lash hummed in my ear, her head turning to watch something behind us while a soft breeze sent her hair tickling against my chin.

There were others on the street, I knew. It was a public walkway. Case in point: the man in patched pants walking along the other side of the road, head rocking from side to side as he talked to his own demons. Still, that considering hum and the suddenly loud grind of detritus under rubber caused my pleasantly full belly to clench. A graying bulk of a vehicle crossed lanes and pulled to a stop a few car lengths ahead of me. The door opened and I let go of my girlfriend's hand, instinctually stepping in front of her as a clashing sense of déjà vu crept up the back of my neck.

“Behind you, my host.” She whispered, and I glanced from the opening car door to see another pedestrian utilizing the length of his rather significant stride to the fullest. I recognized him as one of the other patrons at the Denny's; a man that had entered shortly after we'd gotten our food and only ordered coffee while he read a book.

A man who could have been attending classes at U of C hopped out of the back of the gray Escalade and reached up, one well toned arm seeming to punch the sky as he elongated his side. From the way his crisp, white dress shirt pulled tight against his broad shoulders it was obvious he wasn't armed in any of the usual places. With his long sleeves rolled up to the elbows I couldn't see anything like the wrist sheaths I sometimes used, either. His arms came down so he could clasp his hands behind his back and a loud pop of joints ended the presentation.

It'd made me almost miss the second man who had exited the vehicle from the other side. My cheeks burned. The second guy was a tower of muscle and power wrapped in a too-nice suit that clashed horribly with the sunglasses on his face. Despite the glasses, however, something in the shape of his jaw and the gelled styling of his hair tripped up a memory. My nose twitched.

Blood. Gore. Violence in tooth and claw.

“Miss Dresden.” The younger man's voice sounded faintly familiar, and was warm enough to melt butter. I wished I had a wall to put my back to. I walked closer to the collegiate, keeping just out of lunging range for the diner stalker.

Freshly fed, my magic simmered just beneath my skin, ready and willing. I could knock these guys down and run, but then what? “That's me.”

The young man smiled like he'd just won a carnival game, pleased as punch, but the warmth was transient. Practiced. His eyes were cold, calculating, and far older than the face they were set into. As the third person neared, I felt the heat of power prickle along my back. The bubble of unfamiliar life clashed with my own colder magic, but the shock of the eyes I stared into was enough to rank the shapeshifter as the lesser danger.

A shirt and well tailored slacks instead of the businessman suit combo his underlings wore, and brown hair peppered with youth instead of gray, but I knew those eyes. They belonged to one of the few men I could stare down without the risk of getting sucked in. They were the green, marbled, like an old dollar that had been folded and crumpled and passed around longer than ghost stories around campfires.

They were Marcone's eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a doozy to write and ended up being way longer than anticipated. First off, Id!Harry wasn't even supposed to be here, Harry was supposed to be talking to Lash in the dreamscape, but Darth Dresden took the wheel and refused to give it back till he said his piece. I wanted to have Lash make a joke about 'you, yourself, and I' but I couldn't find a way to make it seem natural. Then there was this bit of dialog from the original Harry/Lash snuggling in the dream that was scrapped because it no longer seemed to fit, but sums up Lash's situation to a T: 
> 
> "I cannot be Fallen, for I never Fell. Though I possess memories of Heaven, I have never walked those hallowed halls. There is no place in Heaven or Hell for me, wizard mine. I am something new. And all I have, all I have ever had, is You."
> 
> The poem/song Harry was thinking of was Loreena McKennit's rendition of The Highwayman.  
> What he ended up getting was [Highwayman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFkcAH-m9W0)
> 
> And now that a Wild Marcone has appeared, the plot should be picking up the pace. Next update in... I'm shooting for July.


	6. Riding In Cars With Scumbags

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter came together faster than expected, and there is a new kitten in the household. It is gray. I am hoping he/she/it (we were promised a girl but we suspect kitten is actually a boy, waiting for balls to drop to be sure) grows into a Mister. Also, SEE ARCHIVE WARNINGS.

In another White City on the other side of creation I'd seen through the jaded chips of ice to the sterile meat locker within. The Marcone I'd known had been a businessman where the phrase minimum effort for maximum gain applied equally to removing his rivals and disposing of their bodies. Despite working with the man on occasion I hated him, though the anger had cooled a bit with time and distance, and I can't truthfully say that it was principle alone that kept the flame burning through the years. When vampires stalked the street at night and trolls lurked under overpasses a mob boss who held children as sacrosanct really was the lesser of the evils.

But you can't re-make a first impression, and between a sorcerer trying to literally explode my heart and the walking death promise that was Warden Morgan that first meeting had been _bad_. Ask anyone: I could give Eb's donkey's lessons in intractability, and I do not enjoy seeing into people's souls. It is in some ways more intimate than sex, and what is seen in cannot be unseen. The knowledge lingers burned into your soul like that which has been viewed with the Sight. And Marcone had tricked me into it with the cold calculation of a predator. Part of me suspected it had been intentional: a way to verify for himself my wizardly claims without blowing anything up.

For a moment I forgot that the Marcone sizing me up wasn't the Marcone I knew, and I glared right back into his money-green gaze with all the surety of a wizard who had already had that particular cherry popped. Such was an indulgence I could rarely afford, and like first impressions old habits died hard.

The faint tingle in the back of my mind, along with Lash's warning hiss of _Harry_ against the damp, fine hairs on the back of my neck were all the warning I had before Marcone's soul started to get a good grip on mine. Thankfully, it was warning enough. I ripped my gaze from the young gentleman's greed endorsed eyes so violently that I stumbled into my fellow Denny's enthusiast. My lower jaw slid out in instinctual challenge, teeth grinding, as I bounced away from the enforcer like a startled cat and gave a once over of the more immediate danger. Not the greater danger, though I had no doubts tall, wide, and well read could snap me over his knee, but more immediate.

Something about the way the sunlight hit the stooge's hair bleaching it to an orange rather than bright red rang a faint bell of recognition in my head. I leaned toward him, just slightly, splitting my attention between the shapeshifer and the supposedly friendly neighborhood mafia boss. My nostrils flared as I pooled my magic into my mouth, tasting the scent of the man, and over a year of co-habiting and regularly interacting with this world's flavor of were-something-or-other let me peg the man for a tiger. St. Louis only had one that I knew of, Christine, and as far as I knew she liked it that way.

She liked it enough that there was some sort of unspoken agreement between all the other shifter groups that Christine would manage those too weak or too few in number to have a proper clan/pack/support structure in exchange for any wandering weretigers to remain so.

Unfortunately, that knowledge floating out from the dark file room of my brain didn't stop the incredulous blurt of, “Cujo?!”

“Ah, Mr. Hendricks. You didn't mention you had met Miss Dresden?” Marcone's smile didn't fade, and in fact only spread wider to bare a thin line of white, but I could see Cujo's body go still the way a cat's would when it was deciding if it was supposed to pounce on the squeak toy or run from it. Like Marcone, the bodyguard's appearance was younger than I remembered. Or- no. That wasn't right. Marcone was younger. Young. Fresh faced, unlined by years, with a mischievous grin that did nothing to soften the ice picks of his eyes.

The Hendricks I knew was a bruiser that took the phrase school of hard knocks literally. He was the varsity football star that couldn't quite make it to the pros and went from breaking ribs on the field to breaking legs in the shadows. The man's resume had been written in his skin, his stance, his _growl_. This guy? Shifters didn't heal like vanilla mortals. If anything, they healed like wizards if wizards had access to wound specific time-lapse spells. If the weretiger beside me had ever broken his nose, once or a dozen times, I couldn't tell. His hands were unmarked from cuts or split skin or even callouses.

Magical mani-pedi for the win.

“We haven't.” Hendricks rumbled, meaty paw coming down on my shoulder as if to help steady me after the bump, and quick flick of my own gaze confirmed his was still human. Random passerbys on the street might think we were friends. His hand was warm, though, warm enough that if I made a movement he didn't like he could have switchblades for fingers before I could blink. Gabriel had been fond of that trick, but I'd never let him get close enough to use it.

My duster was enchanted using a principle of halting and redistributing the physical force behind bullets and blades. It would do jack all to a magic attack.

I wondered which claws counted as and decided I'd rather not find out.

With a cheek achingly wide smile I dipped away from his hand, shaking it off with a little combo curtsy-twirl as I used the motion to lace my will with the warm afternoon air. “Nope. Sorry. I just thought he looked like someone I knew for a second.” All the seconds. Still thinking it.

Bodyguard number two, he of the vaguely familiar spikes and out of date shades, stepped into my exit path with the kind of speed that was just plain cheating. The puff of air his sudden movement generated brought with it a fresh wave of hot, wet earth and a faint tinge of animal musk. Another shifter. Another tiger. My gaze flicked briefly up into the wide eyed, warped reflection of myself in the mirrored shades before their boss continued in his criminally smooth baritone.

“A shame.” Marcone said with a sigh, stuffing his hands in his pockets and forcing me to consider just how deep those pockets went. If I know my scumbags, John would have run _rings_ around Gollum. “You are not an easy woman to get a hold of, Ms. Dresden. Or do you prefer Executioner...? _Wizard,_ perhaps?”

I flashed my teeth at him, throwing in an uncaring shrug. The strain of keeping my magic and the slowly accreting defensive spell reigned in added a little maniacal glint to my dark eyes. Wisps of dark hair drifted in my personal breeze. “What can I say, I like to play hard to get.”

Pale lips twitched, a spasmatic movement of indecision on turning up or down, and a foreshadow of the man I once knew peaked out of his affected expression of amusement. They were temporary wrinkles now, whereas in another twenty or thirty years grooves would have been worn into that stupidly self-satisfied face molding him into everyone's favorite uncle. Father. _God_ father.

“I'll admit I'm curious, though.” I continued, backing up as angel granted memory guided my feet around broken chunks of street curb toward an empty parking lot. I relaxed my hold on the spell just enough to release some of the building pressure, coincidentally causing my coat to billow dramatically. The obvious lack of breeze to relieve the afternoon sun and the flaring leather was enough to give the attack tigers pause. Vampires did similar tricks. Humans, even human-servants, not so much. “What a bunch of wiseguys would want with little old me. I'm not exactly dressed for work, here.”

“No need to be insulting, Harriet.” Marcone stated, forgoing titles entirely, still smiling that boyish yet frozen smile and rocking back on his causal brown wingtips. His right hand was slowly sliding out of his pocket, slow enough I could see it wasn't holding the handle of a gun, or a knife, but a small white rectangle. “Your reputation precedes you, which is fortunate as it seems in this case we have one of similar interests.”

He held the white business card loosely between mid and pointer finger, flicking it at me as if daring me to take it. Even where I was standing I could tell it was professionally done, if done in a minimalistic black lettering on white linen cardstock style. I didn't want to give up ground or get closer than necessary. The Baron of Chicago and I'd had a rough, sometimes downright pugnacious, understanding. This Marcone was an unknown... the aborted soulgaze proved that.

My teeth slid against each other as I ground the thought loudly between them.

I marched forward, against my better judgement, and moved to snatch the business card from John's hand to put the thought to bed once and for all. Cujo's prettier twin shifted as if to intercept, but a jerk of his master's chin kept him in place. A soft rumble like shifting boulders rolled out of Shade's chest where he loomed near the younger man. As I swiped the deceptively innocent card from Marcone my fingertips brushed against his, skin on skin.

My magic brushed against his. Breath escaped my body as if I'd been punched in the gut. The scumbag's smile didn't widen so much as it deepened before finally reaching the glacial greenery of his eyes. It was the sort of expression I imagined Sylvester would have made if he'd ever managed to eat that little shit of a canary. Like called to like, and though it wasn't a perfect mirror I knew down to my bones what I was facing.

It was clear to me that Marcone, any Marcone, had not been born with magical talent. However, you didn't need magic for a vampire to share marks and forge a bond with you. They didn't even need consent – only mortality.

John Marcone, gangsta extraordinaire, was someone's human-servant.

The thought grated against my skull, incongruous, because I could not imagine Marcone, any Marcone, accepting someone as his Master. At least not any longer than it took to drive his knife into their weak spot for massive damage – and then twist. Though it explained the apparent youth. I backpedaled a few steps as my brain rebooted, thoughts flickering at the implications. Was it a political play? A safeguard against some greater evil? John Marcone could be an ally. A client. Never servant.

But I wasn't Jean-Claude's servants, exactly, was I?

John evidently had weretigers on staff, but I was _positive_ that the Master of Chicago went by the name of Augustine and his animal to call was _lions_. Chicago hosted one of the largest prides in the US, second only to a group out in California. And, another thought drifted up to muddy the water as second-hand memories are want to do, Auggie's Human-Servant was the true OG Octavian.

“So, Harriet.” John continued as I sucked in a steadying breath and checked the bit of stolen paper in my palm. I snorted at the familiar phrasing, doctored as it was with Zane's own brand of humor. Or maybe he just thought it was an accurate description of my services. It sort of was. “I think we'll all be much more comfortable discussing things out of the sun, and Mr. Kochanski would be happy to drop you off at your hotel once we're done. Mr. Hendricks, if you would-”

“And if I refuse the offer?” I interrupted Marcone, rudely, jerking my staff away from Hendricks' waiting arms. A muscle in the red head's cheek jumped. His beast, irritated, brushed just beneath the surface of his skin like a whale breaching for air before diving under the cool waters of self-control. He raised his hands and took a single step back from me, arching his eyebrows expectantly at Marcone. I let Lash keep track of the man while I sized up his boss. My thumb traced the watermark centered on the business card; the faint press of the pentacle's circle passing around the through the printed words.

_Harry Dresden – Executioner_

_Animations. Assassinations. Advice._

_Rates: Exorbitant._

The sigh that escaped John wasn't boyish in the least. If he had glasses, and was English, he'd have taken them off his face to polish on the corner of his tweed jacket. If he was here on the behalf of his vampire master -the record of my brain skipped a bit on the thought- things could get dicey and I did not want to get caught in the middle of a power play between vampire factions. I especially did not want to do so unarmed, and while the foci did not a wizard make leaving my staff behind had only ever lead to Bad Things.

Marcone tucked his thumbs into his beltloops, shoulder's hunching forward, affability melting as he blinked and the frown that replaced it was laced with something extra. And very John. My stomach gurgled unhappily and I looked away from him to Shades, to Hendricks, to anyone and anything except for John and his disappointed expression that was worse than-! My big brown eyes widened. Righteous indignation was a fine cornerstone for the condensed magic I gathered around me as a shield of pure, indominable will. The runes on my staff glowed the dull red-brown of banked embers in response to the spike of anger as I slammed the end of it onto the pavement.

The fragile leash I'd been holding on the air vanished, and without it the tiny cyclone that had been gathering momentum at my feet was suddenly free to expand. It did so. Without my will guiding it there wasn't enough concentrated force to lift the Escalade, or even Marcone and his men, but the scattering winds kicked enough street debris in the air that Hendricks raised an arm to shield his eyes and the open door slammed shut. I dodged Shade's attempt at a grab, my own vampire marks making me faster than the average goonie, and slammed my staff into the side of his knee as hard as I could. It was pretty damn hard, and he went down. I think I heard something crack. I definitely heard something click; the normally quiet sound magnified by providence for my benefit.

Hendricks, with his beast packed away in a show of control I rarely saw even in alphas, had a 9mm pointed at my stomach as his thumb settled back into place after switching off the safety. Lash helpfully identified it as a Sig Sauer, and that they clearly wanted me alive. How long I needed to live was another question. I was fast, but not faster than a bullet, and I bleed just as much as the next guy. Chicago being Chicago, and Marcone being Marcone, they could probably plant a few iron seeds in my stomach to force me to listen to them before dropping me off outside the nearest Emergency Room.

With bond between me, JC, and Richard so long as the bullets weren't silver I wouldn't be down long. I was almost tempted to keep lunge at the armed thug, anyway, just to be contrary.

I hissed angrily though a clenched jaw, “I don't know what kind of vampire mind-wiles your master is sharing with you, but stay the fuck out of my head, _John._ ”

The mafioso frowned, and I finally got a peak at real emotion. Anger, but strangely enough I didn't feel it directed at me. He closed the distance between us in two steps and ignored Hendricks questioning cry of as he stepped right into the weretiger's line of fire, shielding me. Marcone wasn't that much shorter than I had been. Now I glowered up at him, suddenly wishing I'd shelled out for the five inch heels even if I couldn't walk in the things.

“I apologize.” He said, voice breathy with a simmering rage. “That was rude of me. I trust, as one... human... to another that there is no need to get the nightlife involved in this matter.”

“Honestly?” I arched an eyebrow.

“You could use the bonds between you all to speak to Richard, who would inform Jean-Claude at nightfall.” Lash spoke, though her eyes fluttered to half-mast as she weaved between the three men. “Jean-Claude could demand restitution from Augustine for allowing you, his knight, to be accosted so in Augustine's territory... but it would also open up the chance that Augustine could demand the same for another Master's agent moving about his territory unannounced.

“Further, there is the complication that Jean-Claude, per Council Vote, is not considered a mere Master of the City. Considering his new status, there is a good chance that your appearance could be taken as a hostile action. An invasion. The Master would then be required to respond appropriately or lose face with his Kiss. If he is well established, it wouldn't matter, I don't think... but I do not know how Augustine rules his people.” Lash's nose wrinkled in displeasure. “If he even still does. It is entirely possible, my host, that with your luck the man is dead and the mortal lord's counterpart serves the city's new master.”

The breakdown was delivered in mere seconds. The miracle of conversations taking place solely in the mind allowed that sort of thing.

My other eyebrow joined the first as the Escalade door swung open, surprising me. It was a large vehicle, and while the windows were tinted to prevent a clear view of the interior I would have guessed any backup waiting within would have come out once I started flinging magic around. The person that had opened the door, however, didn't join us for our little showdown. From my position all I could see was single, frail hand sliding back from the door handle while an even frailer voice called, “Miss Executioner. Dresden. Please. Forgive the nature of this meeting. My granddaughter's life is at stake, and you are the only one we know of that has experience in such matters.”

Lash and I shared a look, mine surprised and hers resigned and knowing. She vanished from my sight in a theatric show of snow and feathers, gone and not gone. Waiting and watching. My shoulder's relaxed from the defensive hunch I hadn't realized I'd gone into with Marcone looming over me, and I leaned around him peer into the shadowy depths of the still running Cadillac. I relaxed further and extended my more esoteric senses, the cold chill of passing death brushing up against Hendricks' warmth and causing him to pause in his holstering and glare at me, but if the man in the Caddy was a daywalker or some kind of zombie I couldn't tell.

I had enough faith in my own brand of necromancy to be sure that meant he was alive. I sucked in a breath as I straightened myself out and pinched the inside of my cheek with my teeth. Marcone's breathing was shallow, his chest barely moving, in through the nose and out through the mouth as I asked, “A kid?”

I didn't know this Marcone. But I knew _a_ Marcone. Maybe that was enough.

I didn't want to see the soul of the sort of man who willingly threw in with vampires. And, no, that isn't hypocritical because I'm perfectly happy not knowing what my own looks like thanks very much.

John nodded, mouth pressing into a grim line as he waved off his displeased bodyguards and I followed him toward the foreboding door. “Twelve going on forty.”

What? “What.”

I climbed into the gangsta mobile and immediately noticed the interior had been modified. The middle seats were gone, not just folded down but gone. An old CRT television with VHS player had been set up in their place. I had the choice between sitting on the floor, or on the bench with Marcone and an old man.

Small transparent tubes trailed from an oxygen tank to the grandfather's nose. The pale brown plastic of a hearing aid poked out of his ear. I wouldn't have been surprised to learn he was ninety and had a pacemaker, but you wouldn't know it just by looking at him. He didn't slouch. He made the few strands of white hair still on his head look dignified.

I choose the floor, laying my staff on the carpeting behind me. I leaned back, as nonchalant as I could, keeping my hand firmly attached to the carved wood. Normally, old guys hung out in parks playing chess or in diners hitting on waitresses young enough to _be_ their granddaughters. They didn't ride around with mafia bosses. Unless they were the mafia bosses? Now that was a thought, and there was something about the old man I felt I was missing. “Well? You got me in here.”

The vehicle swayed as the weretigers slammed their respective doors and we were off. Absently, I noticed Hendricks reaching up and adjusting the rearview mirror so it focused on me. Shades had to do a little maneuvering to get us back in the proper lane and out of the oncoming traffic, but this particular stretch of road was just as desolate as it had been during my walk.

Marcone leaned back in a leather seat. He tilted his head and his neck cracked loudly in the quiet of the car. “Almost... two years ago, now. You broke up a pornographic therianthrope ring, did you not?”

“Yeah.” I'd put two silver bullets in Gabriel's face and then burned his whole disgusting studio to the ground. Fire was the only thing shapeshifters couldn't heal, no matter how much time passed. I hadn't had my pyromancy at the time, but when it comes to accelerants kerosene is practically magic.

“It is that expertise that we need. Mr. Reuel.” _Reuel._ Ronald Reuel. Marcone said the name and I tried to keep my face as blank as Jean-Claude could keep his as a flashbulb of memory and glossy crime scene photos went off in my mind. I'd never met the former Summer Knight, but I had investigated his death, and seeing the man's carnival mirror copy now I had to wonder just why he had accepted the Summer Mantle. What circumstances led him offering sanctuary to changelings of the opposing court? I hadn't given it a single thought before. He had been murdered, was mourned, and his mantle missing. That was all I needed to know and all I wanted to know. Back then, minimizing my interactions with the Faerie courts had been the priority.

Ronald Reuel took a deep inhale through his nose and gave a gracious nod of acknowledgement, raising his arm to point a remote at the squat TV and turn it on. The screen lit up with an audible _futhunk_ and the built in VCR emitted a series of clicks that signaled a tape moving into position for play. The old man looked out the window, some unspoken thing passing between the retiree and the criminal. I twisted toward the television screen.

Black and white specs cleared into the image of a young girl dressed in what could only generously be called a school uniform. It was more like a sexy Halloween costume, but on a girl that young it just looked exploitive. Wrong. She was walking down an empty hallway and with every bouncing step the camera caught a glimpse of the daisy-print panties beneath navy pleats.

“Angelica!” An authoritative, male voice called offscreen and the naughty school girl froze. Her mouth opened in a practiced gasp that revealed the petite fangs within. “Did you really think I wouldn't notice you texting during class, young lady? The rules are clear, unless you think you are above them?”

The man's face wasn't visible as he stepped into the scene. All we could see was a cream colored suit that towered over the littlest vampire as she looked down, chin tucked, gravity pulling her mass of feathered blonde hair forward to hide her expression, and a single mary-jane clad foot digging uselessly at the bright shiny tile. “N-No, Mr. Dawson.”

“You know what this means, Angelica. If writing lines wasn't enough to curb your rule breaking I'll have to take a more... _personal_ hand in disciplining you.”

“I-I'm sorry, Mr. Dawson! It won't happen again, it was just, my boyfriend-! ”

“Angelica. You're parents have been informed of your detention, now come with me.”

She followed him a short ways away, though I got the feeling the same short length of hallway had been shot from different angles to make it seem longer. The girl wasn't happy to be there. How much of it was faked for the camera and how much was genuine didn't matter. I watched as the man ordered her to put her hands on the desk and spread her legs.

He frisked her, then, checking for more banned items after confiscating a sleek little cell phone. His hands slowly groped his way up her ankles, along her thigh-high stockings to tease at the sensitive skin just above them. She whimpered apologies to 'Mr. Dawson' as he pressed against her, pelvis grinding against her tiny backside, while his hands slid over her exposed belly.

Watching, I felt my own gorge rise. Rough, massive hands disappeared beneath the miniature sailor's top and pulled tiny breasts from their bra. The fabric was sheer enough his fingers could clearly be seen pinching her nipples, pulling them, as the girl shivered and bit her lower lip. The speakers built into the old television sparked and cut out, a small blessing. Through a growing haze of static the camera zoomed in on a trickle of blood that fell from her mouth, down her jaw, to splatter in slow motion on the top of the desk.

It got worse from there. Watching it, I felt cold. Hollow. My eyes burned and the screen got brighter. The little girl counted strikes as a telescoping pointer was brought down with enough force to, eventually, split the skin on her now bare ass.

“Enough.” I breathed, voice shaky as I faintly registered the scent of ozone. Vampires could take a lot of abuse if they had even a little bit of blood afterward. Until recently they hadn't even had the right to exist in the eyes of the law. Perfect victims. “ _Stop it_.”

The old television self-destructed before Mr. Reuel had a chance to turn it off. The screen momentarily flared a brilliant blue-white, over taking the image of the little girl tearfully rocking into the desk with every slap of silver against flesh, and heavy gray smoke wafted from the back of the TV. As the tinted windows were cracked to keep us all from suffocating in the now chemically scented car I kept my gaze locked on Johnny's jaw and thought about how nice it would be to punch it. “What the fuck, John.”

“Exactly what I want to know, _Harry_.” The smile Marcone favored me with was less a smile and more a baring of teeth. “The 'star' of the film is Mr. Reuel's granddaughter, Stephanie Reuel. She and her parents were attacked forty seven years ago while on a camping trip. The corpses of Mr. and Mrs. Reuel were found a week after they went missing. Stephanie never was.”

Ronald turned away from the window then, and reached into his breast pocket for a yellowed scrap of paper. He looked down at it and his expression, formerly dignified if detached, softened. He turned his hand outward so I could see the strip of pictures that had to have come from a cheap photo booth. A man and a little girl were smiling, cheeks pressed against each other, both with dark yellow hair and the girl was a dead ringer for Angelica. Stephanie.

“My son and his daughter. Thomas and Stephanie. They took this when they stopped for gas, stapled it to the post card...” Ronald repocketed the images and pat his chest. He took another long, strong inhale of bottled oxygen while his weathered hands idly stroked the canister. “...I've hired several people over the years to give me some clue as to where Stephanie's remains might have been buried. The thought of her alone, or kept as a trophy, I couldn't bear. But no one could find her. Not the police. Not the detectives. Not the psychics. Not until a year ago when my latest hirling managed to bring me that... video. The last I heard from him he was going to track down _motherfucking pieces of horseshit_ that made it. That was the _last_ I heard from him, not even an invoice.”

I pressed my tongue to the back of my teeth and pulled my legs to my chest. The PI was likely dead. Anyone with enough know-how and resources to keep a vampire, even a child vampire, under control likely knew enough to _thoroughly_ disappear any nosy gumshoes. And it was illegal to turn anyone under the age of consent, anyway. Not that it would have been a concern back when Stephanie was first turned, assuming the girl in the snuff film was her and not a look alike, but as a general rule vampires _didn't_ turn _children_. It was bad for business, for one thing, and for another...

I could still feel the faint vibrations from wheels over cements, but it was suddenly much darker than later afternoon warranted. I was forced to blink away a memory so bright and clear it was almost a hallucination. A beautiful woman naked but for the blood painting her skin and the kind of long, dark hair poets wrote sonnets about lead a tiny girl in an elaborate, child sized wedding dress off by the hand.

No. As disgusting as it was, feeding from children was A-OK in the vampire playbook. Turning them got you a visit from the head of your bloodline, and no one wanted that.

Especially the child vampire in question.

Jean-Claude had said it himself last night. Abominations were typically destroyed. Children, especially young children, were as much of an abomination as the elderly. I coughed, then swallowed as night returned to day. “I sympathize, but if the cops couldn't do anything with this what makes you think I can?”

“If the cops knew, the vampires would know. I would know.” Marcone dropped that ominous statement with the same aplomb a master baker dropped dough to be rolled out. Ronald Reuel and went back to watching scenery go by, but it wasn't an action of defeat. There was steel in his spine, and in his eyes. If I couldn't help him he would just start looking elsewhere. He would keep looking for his granddaughter until he died, probably.

Marcone touched left and right fingertips together, a parody of prayer, and flashed one of those happy boyish smiles that was all con. “You managed to track down the ringleaders for the shifter snuff films that were making the rounds. I must say, I was quite surprised to find out the man I hired had teamed up with the Executioner to put the Nimir-Raj and his Lupa down. I had gotten more than my monies worth on that job, _much_ more.”

This time it was my turn to twitch. My fingers played along the carved length of black walnut, alternately squeezing and releasing. Wishing it was Marcone's neck I was squeezing. _This guy._ I hadn't asked Kincaid who'd paid him; I just accepted the half he had deposited into my bank account with a numb nod and ate enough onion rings to make myself sick. Suddenly being responsible for several other adults, some of which didn't have permanent housing of their own, meant I couldn't afford to question where the money came from.

“Of course.” Marcone continued. “According to federal law, any vampire that bears witness to another vampire committing a crime and does nothing to stop it is considered guilty of that self-same crime. Unfair, perhaps, but true. Those with power have to be held accountable for it.”

Was it just me, or were his teeth getting sharper? It had to be me. Human-servant's couldn't catch lycanthropy, or any other form of the virus. “The same is true for shapeshifters. And there are still some states Mr. Kochanski won't go to. Speciesism is such an ugly thing. But you know all that, right, Nimir-Ra?”

“Oh.” Lash said, and I knew that she had just realized what was happening here. A bit slow, for her, but it had come rather out of left field. By law Zane, Cherry, Nathaniel, Gregory, and Vivian were all guilty of the crimes Gabriel had forced them to commit. It didn't matter that none of them wanted to trick kids expecting a wild spring break of experimenting and drinking into rape and cannibalism. Zane had tried to resist, and was forced into his leopard form and left like that for _months_. Thou shall not transform others was a thing, and from the psychic damage Zane was still recovering from the Laws of Magic held true here as well.

It wasn't Zane's fault. It wasn't any of their faults, but bigotry being what it was meant if their involvement was made known the pard would be up for a firing squad. And I had promised them I would keep them safe. They were more than my responsibility. They were my friends.

“Yeah.” I conceded with a whisper, Lash's arms like steel bands around my chest the only thing stopping me from lunging at the young man who had just threatened _my_ pard. The John I knew would never be so crass as to blackmail me, nevertheless that was what _this_ one just did, if not in so many words. I suppose, in this twisty-turny fucked up world, I was the criminal. Dereliction of duty, aiding and abetting, or something. But legal didn't mean right, and I was human enough it would not be me that got the automatic death sentence. I matched Marcone's genial grin tooth for tooth. I pushed my voice higher, willed my eyes to be glassy and head to bobble, and continued. “But, golly-gee mister, I'm not an investigator. I'm an _Executioner._ ”

Johnny Marcone wasn't a shapeshifter, but looking at him as we rolled to a stop outside the shaded lobby of my motel he was just as much a tiger as his bodyguards. Just like the counterpart I'd once fought against, beside, and for all in turn. Johnny's voice was soft, pleased, almost a purr. “I know.”

And knowing was half the battle. Fuck you, GI Marcone. Chicago was such a goddamn clusterfuck.

At the thought I felt a rush of warm-fuzzy nostalgia. I hopped out into the warm, fresh air and watched the Escalade drive off, still trailing faint streamers of smoke. I considered blowing out the tires because fuck you Marcone, but that would be petty, and ultimately I'd have to suffer his presence while they waited for a replacement vehicle and/or tow truck.

Speaking of tow trucks...

Mosely wasn't expected to show for another few hours, and I had yet to arrange repairs for my poor beleaguered Jeep. Best get on that. Marcone was some vampire's somebody, and if he was being truthful about the vampires all but owning the police... no fucking wonder Mosely hadn't wanted to linger in the station longer than absolutely necessary. I wanted my car out of the parking lot ASAP.

After climbing the stairs I stood outside my motel room door. I reached into my coat pocket for the key and grumbled, “Gunna have to ask Rafael's guys to check the damn thing for bugs and shit when I get home...”

 


	7. ...Before I Sleep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter should have been out a month ago but was delayed twice. First, by me getting kidnapped into a new fandom. Then, when I had determined to do more Dresden Fic I was hit by consecutive deaths in the family one of which being my grandmother. It was impossible to write anything with Lulu without drowning my laptop in tears. Whiskey helped. I'm feeling much better now.
> 
> I'm actually shooting for an update every-other month, as I am now also trying to work on an Assassin's Creed/Skyrim bit of silliness to keep myself from getting too sad. BUT TIME HEALS ALL WOUNDS AND THE FIC MUST FLOW. (Also Vodka.)
> 
> FYI Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter #26 "Serpentine" came out on August 7th so if you want to check that out at the Library go ahead. That's where I got my copy!

For all that accepting a guest spot, and the attendant payment to feed my greedy pocketbook, had hurt my local reputation _The_ _Larry Fowler Show_ hadn't gotten much traction outside of Chicago. I think FOX had picked it up for syndication, but instead of running between daytime soaps their targeted audience seemed to be insomniacs on the midnight run between hour long Thighmaster and Bowflex commercials. As I delicately flipped through a wrinkly TV guide I couldn't find mention of the show, or the man. Someone called _Murray_ was the center of a reality show dealing with the trials and tribulations of recent Canadian immigrants, and based on the episode descriptions conflict between Humans First activists and the PC brigade was the main draw, but that was it.

Maybe Larry Fowler had become a banker in this reality. Or a fashion designer. Or maybe his ratings had been so low the local channel four dropped him like yesterday's news and retconned the self-important asshole out of existence. I put the TV guide aside and rolled onto my back, head falling easily onto a fresh pillow. It was quiet in the room; aside from the warhorse of an air conditioner that continued chugging along despite being in my august presence. The ceiling was surprisingly calming when combined with the background hum of the air unit as I examined raised veins in the off-white paint.

My mouth wasn't quirked into a content smirk. As a mature and reasonable adult, I wasn't bitter about being called a fraud and threatened with a law suit just because someone got exactly what they'd asked for. Even if it had been accidental on my part. I was still human, after all, and humans made mistakes. Sometimes thousands of dollars worth of expensive recording equipment mistakes.

My brief bubble of happiness burst as the older memory brought to mind the acrid scent of the smoke produced by Marcone's television set as it reacted to my magic. The CRT and the player itself had been old, cheap, so John-Boy probably had experience with the more powerful mortal magic users. That was concerning. But, if he had a wizard, or someone with a wizard's know-how, on staff he wouldn't need me.

Unless it wasn't my magic he wanted but my gun. Specifically, the all but a license to kill my status as an Executioner brought me. The current laws we all operated under in regards to vampires and the preternatural in general were both wide and vague and a result of hurried compromises by both parties. Mostly, interpretation had been left up to the local and state governments while Congress continued to hash out the politics. That was how you got places like Southern California with known gangs of therianthropes in a three way street war with both cops and bounty hunters because due process, but follow the line on up to Oregon and someone could be murdered in cold blood but so long as the corpse tested positive for the shifter virus _after-the-fact_ no charges could be filed.

The precedent was uncomfortably similar to how I, in the eyes of certain wardens, had gotten away with murder once upon a time.

It was also how I, so long as I remained in my assigned jurisdiction, was practically a god to the local goblins and ghoulies. Hell, I'd heard of one case in Texas where the Executioner had gunned down a vampire not on a warrant but the testimony of three eye witnesses. It was still being debated if that counted as full-filling the three strikes rule. The Executioner in question was still on _technical_ probation, and it was looking more and more like he was going to be booted from the club, but that just meant he'd go on to wield his bounty hunter license instead. I think his name had been Bernard? Beauregard?

Hannah would know. She was an excellent source of legal gossip- er, _news_ \- and ever since I'd accidentally burnt down the Circus she lived in she'd been a font of warmth and welcome to me. It was hard making up excuses to not meet her for a shopping trip, or get our hair done, or any of those classical girlish things she seemed to love and I had absolutely no clue about. Willie usually distracted her when it got too much.

Unfortunately, what I needed now was a Hannah. A Zane. A... _Murphy_.

Fuck.

I thought I was over this. I crossed my arms under my breasts and squeezed myself tight for one second, then two, then I breathed deep and released. I'd spent the majority of my adult life working as a Private Investigator, and I can tell you that as a wizard I was also a dirty, dirty cheat at it. Back in Chicago-That-Was I knew the lay of the land, as it were, and when I needed help that magic wouldn't give me a quick and dirty answer to I'd had Murphy and her contacts through SI.

There was Michael and his sixth sense. Bob, and his own network. The Alphas, in a pinch, when ground needed to be covered. As Nimir-Ra I could call on the Blooddrinkers, but that would cause more trouble than it was worth to move them from St. Louis, and why? None of them were native to the area. It would be more hindrance than help, and if Lash's estimate of my own presence being a potential powder keg of political reprisals than moving an entire Pard would be tantamount to declaring war.

Wereleopards they may be, but they weren't fighters, the girls and Nathaniel especially. It wasn't their job to fight. It was mine. Their _leoparde lionne_ _._

I grimaced and slammed my arms into the mattress on either side of me in fit of childish frustration. Then I raised them and did it again. I was on my own. After the reveal that was the utter corruption of the system the only person I could maybe remotely trust was Mosely, but I wasn't sure how much help he would be or even if he would trust _me_. The guy was an ex-cop, true, but he wasn't from the area. He was a New Orleanian.

I'd gotten the distinct impression that there was a mutual dislike followed by a forced tolerance between him and the police. A real better the devil you know situation. I doubted he'd have the legacy of favors behind him that Murph had used to pull strings and unearth -or conveniently misfile- certain kinds of evidence. Still, we were both animators. That alone would put most bloodsuckers off their game, though it also sounded like the beginning to a bad joke... two animators walk into a bar...

The phone on the nightstand rang, loud and shrill in the empty room, and my whole body jerked as a surprised, “Jebesus!” slurred out of my mouth. I had nearly bitten my tongue. Heart hammering, I laid on my stomach and pulled the phone off of the cradle. Who had my room number? John? It was the kind of stalker thing he would do. I got ready to star sixty nine, just in case. “Room 219, Awesome Speaking.”

“...Harry Dresden?” The line was crackly as usual, but the voice sounded vaguely familiar in the way a David Bowie song on the radio that wasn't China Girl or Major Tom was familiar.

“This is he. She! _She_.”

“Good Afternoon, Ma'am. There is a gentleman in the lobby asking for you? Said he was expected?” Gentleman? It wasn't dark yet. John usually had more patience than this.

“I get a lot of gentleman callers.” I winced at the wording even as it came out of my mouth. “Uh, he got a name?”

There was a pause, along with the soft brush of sound that was probably a palm covering a mouthpiece. A stuttering heartbeat later the voice said, “A Mr. Franklin Mosely, Ma'am.”

Speak of the devil. I glanced at the light still peaking around the drawn window curtain. It wasn't the harsh, white light of day but a softer gold. “He's early. Let him know I'll be down in a minute. Thanks. Bye.”

I hung up the phone and got up with a manly grunt of effort. Had Mosely heard about my meeting with Marcone? At least Mose didn't have the authority to arrest me. Shoot me, maybe, but he couldn't arrest me. “That's a cheerful thought, Dresden.”

I continued muttering under my breath as I pulled my coat sleeves into place to better conceal the wrist sheathes, checking my pockets as I went. Gun, ammo, holy water, handkerchiefs, gum: everything a modern day vampire slayer needs. I picked up my staff and animator's kit and headed for the door.

Mosely was waiting outside the lobby in the shade of the awning, cigarette dangling from his mouth as he watched the sky. He was wearing a tan trench coat this time and his hands were stuffed into the pockets. The boots had been exchanged for comfortable loafers. The hip-holstered sawed off had been replaced by a much smaller piece in a shoulder rig, but all in all he didn't look like he was getting ready for a fight.

I decided to take that for a good sign. I hiked up my staff and waved it a bit in greeting. “Hey, Mosely. I wasn't expecting you so early.”

“Truth be told I wasn't either, but Commander Schwarzwald has her panties in a twist so I figured my time was better spent with a woman who doesn't remind me of a harpy.” Mosely gave me a smile wide enough I wondered how the cigarette wasn't falling out. “Taco?”

I got the abstract feeling I should feel insulted on behalf of women everywhere, but I was still wrapping my mouth around the name. Mosely squatted to pick up a brown paper bag heavy with grease. He offered it with an exaggerated bow before starting the plod back to his car and, I presumed, our doom. “I thought we were consulting with Sheriff Johansen.”

“We are. But the Sheriff and the Commander have been butting heads since before I came here, and it ain't pretty. I'm not sure if she stole his job or he took hers or _what_. And I can't exactly play good-cop bad-cop to find out when everyone else is the badder cop.” Mosely fiddled with the lock on the trunk of his car and I tossed my animator's duffle to settle beside his executioner's kit. The good five feet plus of black walnut I placed in the cramped back seat that would have been torture on knees. It was currently occupied by empty Big Gulps and some shoeboxes.

When I moved the shoe boxes to the footwell and out of the way my skin broke out in goosebumps. The twine-tied boxes were cold, and pregnant with a weight that was less and more than physical: magic. A regular human wouldn't have noticed a thing. Most practitioners wouldn't have either, as the traces of power were so light and diluted, but death was my _thing_ and I was _experienced_. But, honestly, who was I to question why a man tooled around town with a bunch of dead pigeons? I'd seen weirder.

I'd done weirder.

My lips twitched. I wondered if they were his stool pigeons. In my mind, I could easily imagine a short and short haired blonde woman rolling her eyes at me.

I slammed the back passenger door shut and then opened the front, sliding in as Mosely checked his non-existent hair in the rear view mirror. I took my time adjusting the tails of my coat before pulling the door closed. Mosely turned the key in the ignition and the engine roared to life. “So what does he want?”

“She wants you to raise Lulu eh-sap.”

“Mosely, it's still daylight out. You told her that, right?” Not that daylight mattered to me. I had enough magical strength to brute force my way through the cleansing effects sunlight had on the undead and death magic in general, but it wasn't a fact I liked to advertise. The ability was rare enough that scholars and even most practitioners believed raising zombies at night was a rule, like gravity, and not a guideline.

It was probably the one case where I still liked to keep my skills to myself. I didn't even want to think of how unfair and packed my work schedule would have gotten if my former boss knew I could do raisings outside of usual animator hours.

“I did, but as usual, no one wants to listen to ol' Mostly. Wankers.” Mosely grumbled as we left the motel parking lot and pulled onto the street. “Uh, sorry my French.”

I grinned as I opened the bag he'd given me. “That's not French. I believe the word you're looking for is... _branleur?_ ” Mosely gave a bark of a laugh and I wasn't sure who was more surprised by it: him or me. It was a nice laugh, though. Honest. The grease bag was warm in my lap and the paper crinkled as I opened it. The tacos were soft bread, the red juice of the meat already seeping through the individual wrappings and staining paper. My stomach gave a little flip, and I realized I wasn't quite hungry enough to eat something that reminded me of blood. “Why do they hate you so much? You used to be a cop, or am I wrong?”

“Detective, not uniform, but yeah.” Mosely went quiet, eyes on the road, fingers drumming along the steering wheel. His gaze went to the mirror and the reflection of my staff within it. “I was a good cop, Dresden. Maybe I didn't follow all the regulations, but a damn good cop.”

We came to a stop light and his bulk twisted to look at me. It was a full body look, one I'd been exposed to more than once while waiting to pick up one of the boys outside Guilty Pleasures. Strangely, Mosely's gaze didn't stop to linger on my chest but my neck. He huffed, then turned back to driving as a car behind us honked.

“But that was the problem. Good cops don't last long in Chicago.” His smile was full of teeth, then, and I could feel the chill of death that drifted on his emotions like dust in the wind. “But Executioners, now, that's something else. No reports to go missing. No evidence suddenly deemed inadmissible. No superiors giving orders that just... just _don't make sense_. Just a gun and a declaration of intent and damn if that doesn't make up for being a flipping Fed. Am I right?”

He had a point. When the chain of command of command was basically three people long shit got done. It was me, whatever judge had signed the warrant, and the Marshall that swung by to collect my reports at the end of the month.

“Amen to that.” I raised the taco bag in mock toast. Hopefully the kerfuffle in Texas would shake out and leave things as they were.

The last thing I wanted, especially with John Fucking Marcone hanging over my head, was oversight.

* * *

“It doesn't work like that.” Super Boring Lawyer-Man stated with a patience and calm I would never match as I pressed palms to eyeballs in lieu of tearing out my hair. Yes, I wasn't best dressed as my clothes from the day before were still too damp to wear without them clinging in odd places, but for some reason Commander Schwarzwald seemed to take my attire as permission to dismiss everything I said as the ravings of a madwoman and not one of the most infamous and experienced executioners in North America. Ms. Chantrelle's lawyer, however, was the perfect mix of immaculate earthiness to break through the brick wall that was the Ogden Commander.

At the least he could get a dialog going. The man was so unassuming as he stood in the Commander's office it was hard to remember he was present, let alone his name. The surprise that sparked every time he spoke up might have been what was throwing the blonde bombshell off her rants.

“Dead is dead, is it not? Ms. Blake raised her last night she can raise her now.” Commander Schwarzwald claimed for the fifth time. Her pointed nose crinkled prettily in a sneer as she ran her finger beneath the silk scarf at her neck. It matched the vintage business suit she wore: washed out gray from eighties-era shoulder pads to the bottom of her four inch pumps.

I tried not to let my frustration turn to jealously at the woman who _literally_ towered over me in heels that pushed her already amazonian height well beyond the limits of us mortals. I don't think I did very well. “No.” My lips moved around clenched teeth. “Dead is a corpse, and a corpse is a corpse-”

A male voice, in a cheery sing-song perked up from the corner, “Unless of course, his name is-”

“Mr. Mosely!” Schwarzwald barked at the same time Mosely finished the line with a smirk. He had a lit cigarette between two fingers and judging by the smoke trails in the air he had been negligently waving it like a baton. “ _Mr._ Mosely -put that out!- you are here as a courtesy only. There are no bodies for you to stake or heads to claim. Kindly keep your _fantasies_ to yourself or I will have you removed from the building.”

“I think Executioner Mosely makes an excellent point.” Lawyer-Man interjected as his client pursed her lips together. “Lula-May raising early could have some, hmm, unintentional side effects. Zombies are beholden to their animators, are they not? Sir and Madame?” I crossed my arms and began to expanded on the Estate Lawyer's opening. Well done, Lawyer-Man. Well done.

“The curse is funny like that. When they're dead for the day vampires are functionally corpses. They don't decompose, but they don't have a soul-” Here I raised my hands in a peaceful stalling gesture to calm Marie. Getting into a theological debate with her on the status of her grandmother's immortal soul wasn't going to help anyone, least of all Lula-May. “-or whatever it is that holds their memory and spirit after death. If I were to try and raise Lula-May before she starts to wake on her own I wouldn't get a vampire. I'd get a zombie.”

“Yup.” Mosely agreed with a sharp nod.

“A zombie can still answer questions.” The Commander argued, hip-checking her desk. “I know they've been used to settle inheritance disputes, corroborate witness testimony, and such. Gentlemen, ladies, I'm just trying to save us all time _and_ money.”

The last was directed at Marie Chantrelle with an imperiously raised eyebrow. Not to be outdone, and likely rolling in more money most cops would see in their lifetime, Ms. Chantrelle saw Schwarzwald's eyebrow and raised her another.

“Natalia.” Mosely sighed. “Nat. What is wasting time is being here. In this room. Arguing. Keep it up, and we both know Sheriff Johansen is gonna hit you with obstruction charges faster than you can say wet noodle.”

“Oh?” Marie's inquiry was soft and quiet as stone. Lawyer-Man's expression was as bland and pleasant as always, but at some point he had moved from standing beside his client to stand in front of her. Was he protecting Marie from the Commander, or the Commander from Marie? “I thought since my grandmother is resting here the jurisdiction of her case had transferred, too. Is this not so, Commander Schwarzwald?”

Before I could finish considering the reflexes of a banal office worker, the door to the Ogden Commander's office swung wide, blinds clacking against glass and wood, as an aged and gravely voice snarled: “Wet. Fucking. Noodle.”

Sheriff Johansen, as identified by my impeccable detective skills and the name tag pinned above the right breast pocket of his shirt, was older than I'd expected. Where Schwarzwald was a beauty with streaks of white tied back in a bun that looked more like a fashion choice than the aftermath of stress, Johansen's was more gray than black and extended onto a face that looked like it had been left in the sun a little too long. I more expected words like _whippersnapper_ and _lawn_ to come shooting out of his mouth than a spiel of regulations, articles, and accusations.

Behind him, Officer Carmicheal gave me a quick nod acknowledging my existence. I channeled my best Gandalf as I returned it, but the effect was somewhat ruined by the lack of pipe. Unfortunately, both the Alpha Dogs in the room noticed the motion and turned the fires of their mutual dislike onto me. Sheriff Johansen offered his hand in a belated greeting as he looked me over. It was a strong shake, practiced, a brief clasp of heat in my smaller hand as his glasses caught the overhead lighting to hide his eyes in the glare. He let me go and tipped his hat. “So this is The Executioner. Ma'am.”

I didn't recognize what the Sheriff was, but what he was not was human. Not fully. Not if he was running a temperature that high and not falling over in delirium. I tried to subtly scent the air. I failed.

Mosely handed me a wrinkly handkerchief that had probably been last washed sometime in the forties.

“Yes. Well. We were just discussing Ms. Dresden's ability to wake Mrs. Chantrelle now, and save time for everyone.” Commander Schwarzwald drawled. She made a show of checking her watch. “The sun should be down by now, anyway. I've witnessed the newly turned wake with their mentors before – it could be hours, yet. The weaker the childe, the longer to wake.”

Johansen snorted. “I'll believe that when pigs shit gold. You just want first crack at my witness, admit it.”

“There's nothing to _admit_ , you uncultured _relic_ of a-”

“HEY!” I raised my arms in a wide circle and clapped my hands in the air. I cheated a bit, rolling my irritation into the motion and causing the simple slapping of palms to boom like thunder. I swallowed and carefully, slowly lowered my arms at the sudden jump of hands to holstered guns. Right. At least I had some breathing room. “As I, and _Executioner_ Mosely, have been trying to explain we can't raise Lula-May anyway. She's newly dead, a corpse, and if I try to _raise_ her all you're going to get is a zombie with pointy teeth. And to err on the side of not being suicidal, this is assuming being made into a vampire doesn't count as a murder where the magic is concerned and she _doesn't_ go feral ripping through all our limbs trying to track her killer.”

“Ah. I see.” Commander Schwarzwald's words were empty of emotion, but she was looking at me less like an annoying child she had to babysit and more like a puzzle she wanted to break apart. “I hadn't realized a man-eater was a possibility.”

Marie had gone pale, lips thinning, and I had no doubt she was remembering the last night and her grandmother straining against bonds of air to get at my blood.

“You could'a asked me.” Mosely grumped. “S'why no animator with half a brain will touch a corpse that didn't die of natural causes.”

“Assassination is natural causes for a king...”*

“What?” Mose looked at me funny; in fact everyone was looking at me funny.

I shook my head and pulled my duster closed. I didn't know precisely why Commander Schwarzwald wanted to question Lula-May first, though I had my suspicions. Whatever backroom politics and maneuvering was going on could wait.

“I witnessed a woman get strangled to death by her own husband, once.” I whispered into the standoff, not because I wanted to share gory details but because they needed to know. It hadn't been me, me. It had been the Anita that was before me, but it was one of the few memories that were as bright and clear as if I had seen it with the Sight. Of course, out of context it had made no sense but as I'd gotten my footing in this world... “She said she wanted to ask his zombie for forgiveness, all the court documents made it seem like he'd died of a freak accident after he'd caught her cheating. Her therapist even signed all the paperwork giving us the okay to raise him. So I did it. I pulled him right out of the ground and then I watched her die.

“I couldn't shoot him without hitting her – not that bullets do much good against someone who doesn't have pain receptors, or a need to breathe. I'd resorted to wrestling with the bastard but it was useless.  He dragged me along like a toddler clinging to his dad's boots. For all my strength and skill as an animator my magic just rolled right off until he'd finished the job. Her throat was crushed, and like a switch had been flipped he was just standing there. Fully aware of what he'd done, but not understanding _why_.”

“So no.” Mosely picked up the thread, cutting through the somber mood with a flick of his snubbed cigarette into a trashcan. “Forcing Lulu to rise is out of the question, hell, I couldn't do it even if I wanted to.  Takes some serious strength to wake a vamp that ain't ready to be woke."

I eyed the Sheriff. “I'm a _beast_ when it comes to raw magic, and I know a lot, so please trust me when I say I can wait and use the bond we forged last night to help guide her back to herself as a psuedo-Mentor, but I can't snap my fingers and force it. I won't. Not for all the waivers in the world.”

“Very well.” Our lady of unfair height advantages brushed back a few strands of golden hair that had fallen free from the bun. “It would be best then to head down to the vault. I assume you are coming, Ms. Chantrelle? I will of course require you and your representative to remain in the observation room. Mr. Mosely as well. We wouldn't want to risk any... undue influence from a second animator. It might be cause for... doubt. Later.”

Which was bullshit. While it wasn't impossible for one practitioner to take over the animator-animatee bond from another said influence had to be pretty poor to begin with. I'd done it for my apprentice once, but that had only been because he was inexperienced and hadn't learned his own limitations. Three raisings a night for a newbie was insanely stupid even for a powerhouse like Larry, and I'd made my displeasure with my former boss really fucking clear.

It didn't take long for our party to reach the vault I'd left Lula-May in. A different navy-suited secretary was sitting at the desk and her vague half-smile of ingrained manners melted at the sight of us. Or, I suspected, the sight of Schwarzwald and Johansen within spitting distance of each other. “Commander.” The girl said, face a little too pale. “Sheriff. Executioners. What can I do for you?”

“Have we got a visual on the 273F?” Schwarzwald said as she stepped up to the desk.

“Um. Just a moment.” The girl's hands tapped at her keyboard as the bank of screens beside her began to rotate camera angles. We flicked quickly passed the traditional morgue holding drawers before surveying the room proper. The neat, orderly mix of furniture I'd seen last night was gone. Chairs had been overturned, couches pushed aside, and a gray discoloration I could only assume was what remained of a small, furry body had been smeared across a foot and a half of tile. Made for easy clean up, I guess. “Got it.”

On the monitor Lulu-May was black and white and dead all over. Her dress was, in a word, ruined. She had managed to wedge herself beneath a several couches that had been haphazardly stacked, ripping her clothing in the process. It was behavior I hadn't seen before, but I had heard of it. It was a vampire's instinct to bed down and hide from the sun. In the, well, wild isn't quite accurate but I can't think of anything else, vampires have been known to dig into the earth itself if no shelter is available.

Some scholars think that is where the whole sleeping in coffins thing comes from: newborn vampires running back to their 'birth' place like salmon swimming upstream.

It is a horrible comparison and in my letter to the editor of _The Animator_ I said so. Granted, I didn't have any better ideas -the one time I asked Jean-Claude about it he just smiled and gave that damn shrug of his- but a wizard needs a hobby that doesn't involve arson. So they tell me.

I focused on Lula-May's image and planted my feet as I centered myself. Ms. Chantrelle and her lawyer conferred in quick whispers before the woman departed, Mosely bringing up the rear and obviously using Lula-May's granddaughter as a buffer between him and the Commander, leaving her lawyer to observe. “Merely watching for the interests of my client, Executioner. You understand?”

Yeah, buddy.

The secretary held out a visitor's log for me to sign along with a separate waiver. It confirmed I was entering the vault of my own free will and if I was bitten or attacked Ogden was under no obligation to help me. I'd signed the log last night, too, but not the waiver. Maybe they only made you sign it if the room was occupied?

The sheriff and the lawyer would wait outside until I gave to go ahead. I cracked my neck and exhaled, letting my magic go along with my breath. It crept long like a living fogbank, seeking, and as I stepped over the threshold of the vault the scent of death drew it like a fish did cats. I followed it, noting the whirl of the heavy door closing behind me, and righted a sturdy armchair with a kick. I dropped down into it and got comfortable.

Lulu's body was still as the grave, half hidden under her furniture fort, but there was a cold energy that pulsed when I brushed it with my own power. I closed my eyes and Listened. Filaments overhead hummed, and I tuned them out. Something in the vents gargled, but I swiftly ignored it. My own heartbeat was slow and steady in my ears, my magic a net I spread to encompass the room. There was death here, lots of it, but not nearly as strong as the funeral home had been. Nothing that could strike back at the living.

Nothing but- “Lula-May.”

Her Name filled my mouth as her pulse sounded in my ears. Loud and lazy like the largest of church bells, the certain something that made vampires different grabbed at my power like a confused child and clung. I felt my own brow furrowing as I fed the connection and, before I could think better of it, I unsheathed one of the silver blades and slid it over the back of my hand.

The other end of my metaphysical connection jumped, the tempo of the heart approaching something living, and I opened my eyes just before Lula-May's cold, undead hands clamped around my wrist. Her eyes glowed with power, and her skin looked sallow and stretched, but the primal rage and need from before was absent. That did not mean I dropped my knife. Silver was just as deadly to vampires as it was shapeshifters, and unlike with a certain loup-garou it did not need to be inherited.

Lula-May's near toothless mouth opened and she kissed along the bloody back of my hand in a gross parody of a man greeting a beautiful woman. Her tongue lathed lovingly at my skin and she made happy little burbles with every drop of blood that she managed to coax out of the wound.

“Lula-May.” I focused on her name and pulled at the blood she'd already taken. It had only strengthened my power over her, and as I realized this fact I felt a little ill. I swallowed and sat up in the armchair. “ _Lula-May_. Answer me." 

To me. I had a feeling the lawyer wouldn't like that particular phrase.

Granny Lulu stopped the oral molestation of my hand and turned her face upward. She blinked, power and certainty fading from her vampiric gaze until all that was left was an old, confused woman. One hand fell to her lap, the other remained a shackle around my wrist. “Y-yes?”

Actual words were better than I'd expected. Maybe that was the difference in having a 'mentor' and having to learn the ropes yourself. I smoothed her hair down as best I could and tucked it behind her ears. There was nothing to be done about the gore splattered down her front. If you were half blind and didn't know what the real stuff looked like, you might have been able to mistake it for chunky salsa. “Can you tell me your name, sweetie?”

“Lulu.” Lula-May answered with a frown. Her head turned as she began to process her surroundings. Her tongue flicked out to swipe at her bottom lip. She wanted blood so badly _I_ could taste it, but I wasn't about to open a vein. “All the kids call me Lulu...”

I tapped two fingers against her chin and drew her gaze back to me. “Lulu, I need you to focus. Can you do that for me? Can you answer some questions?”

“I think? I... yes?” Her whole body shuddered and she slumped forward. I turned my hand in her grip and her cheek nuzzled my palm instead of the still stinging wound. Gray hair spilled back over skinny shoulders as she purred, “For Master. Heart of my Heart.”

I looked skyward toward what I hoped was the correct camera. “Sheriff, you wanna come in now? This is as good as it's gonna get.”

“Sheriff?” Lulu muttered, face pinched. “Joe?”

Unseen speakers crackled with the secretary's voice. “Please confirm, is the witness ready to talk?”

“That's a ten-four.”

“Understood, stand-by.” The speakers clicked to silence and a beat later I heard the whirl and thud of bolts being hauled back. The heavy steel door swung open and Sheriff Johansen stepped in, gaze narrowing as he took in me in my armchair throne and Lula-May at my feet. She was squinting. In general becoming a vampire improved all senses beyond human norm, but I wasn't sure if that was power-activated specific or if it was just a general plus five to perception. If Lula-May's eyesight was crappy to begin with, how much better would it be post death?

“Mrs. Chantrelle? Ma'am?” Brave Sheriff Johansen squatted down to Lulu's eye level and held his hand out for a shake. My vampire stared at the appendage in incomprehension for several moments before taking his beaten paw in her equally weathered hand. I pretended not to notice how the hand he offered to Lula-May meant she had to let my own wrist go. “It's real good to see you whole, if not exactly healthy.”

“Y-yes. Joe? Is it Thursday already?”

He gave a final, firm shake and then unbuttoned a pouch at his belt. There was a small tape recorder in it, black with a speak of shiny silver where the microphone was, and his thumb depressed the big red button on the side as he brought it to his mouth. “No, I'm not here for canasta. For the Record this is DuPage County Sheriff Joseph Johansen with Executioner Harry Dresden interviewing the deceased: One Lula-May Chantrelle of 1117 Pyramid Dr.”

“Lulu.” Lula-May interrupted with a flurry of eyeblinks. She continued in the exact same tone she'd used with me earlier. “All the kids call me Lulu.”

He corrected himself with an grunt of _henceforth referred to as_ and the date finishing with, “If you would, Ms. Executioner?”

I leaned closer to the mic and tried to keep from exploding anything. It was a nice little gadget, emphasis on little. The ones I'd grown up with had been the size of my head. “Yes. This is Harry Dresden, acting in the role of Vampire Mentor, present.”

He propped the machine on a lonely couch cushion between us all and nodded. “Lulu, if you can, please recount what happened the night you were attacked.”

“Attacked?” Her gummy mouth worried at her lip in sudden nerves, and a single dark droplet trailed down her chin where a fang pierced skin. I winced. “There was an attack? I don't... oh. Oh no. My boy, my sweet boy, Sheriff! Sheriff you have to help me! Master!”

The vampire jerked in place, eyes luminous as she started to lunge toward the backpedaling Johansen before rotating her whole body toward me. Her hands found my duster and clutched at the material, dry wails falling from her mouth. “Master, Master please! My boy, where is my sweet boy? What have they done to him?”

I'd slid out of the chair to crouch on the floor with Lula-May. I wrapped my arms around her and tried to give comfort while screaming at Johansen with my eyes. I was so far out of my area of expertise I was in goddamn space. The man inched forward again and with him came that line of heat -of power- and I belatedly realized what he was doing. Again.

Lulu sniffled and disentangled herself from my arms. She swiveled with unnatural grace as her mouth opened in a distracted 'O'.

I really, really hated owing people things. I especially hated owing people with power I didn't understand.

“Lulu.” Sheriff Johansen called gently, a big contrast to the eyes narrowed into angry slits behind his glasses. “Did something happen with David? Has he been visiting you recently?”

“Davey? No. No no no. Not David. My _sweet_ boy. Such a darling to keep an old woman company... but... I don't... where is my boy, Sheriff? Where is he?”

“Did Lula-May have any grandsons?” I asked in a croak as the cold magic in my gut slowly turned from comforting to horrified. Small bites. Small bodies. Children wouldn't need as much blood as a grown up.

“She did not.”

“Lulu.” Lula-May stated for a third time, the urgency draining from her as she whispered a plaintive, “All the kids call me Lulu.”

I sighed and stood, using her shoulder as an anchor. She may look like a stiff breeze would knock her over but the strength of the dead could have ripped my heart from my chest, properly applied. I inspected the cut on the back of my hand. It still stung. Using a silver knife had been stupid. They were good for rituals, and great for stabbing, but really stupid to use on myself.

As unwieldy as it had been, the machete had been a better choice.

“Or, I could just stop cutting myself.” I grumbled to the faint echo of amusement in the back of my skull. I shook out my arm to free my coat sleeve and sheathed the knife. “I don't think we're going to get much more out of her. She's only been undead two days – nights?”

“Vampires move fu- move fast.” Johansen said. “The suspect could be across state lines by now. Hell, he could be in Canada. This isn't the old days where one of the leeches can just go to ground for a bit and then pop up a few towns over with none the wiser. We have internet. But I have to have a description to pass on or it'll just be another old bloodsucker popping out of the woodwork and ever so thankful for the protection of the law.”

“Joe? Joe, what are you doing here? You should be out looking for my boy!”

Sheriff Johansen gave a slow, amiable nod. “I know, Lulu. But I need you to tell me who I'm looking for. Think. What's your boy look like?”

“Oh, oh. He's sweetness and light, he is. With the softest hair, like a newborn baby, and his eyes... oh, Joe. He had the bluest eyes... you will find him for me, won't you? My boy, my sweet boy...” The vampire stumbled upright and began circling the room. She shifted the heavy hardwood seating like it was made of packing foam started rattling the old morgue drawers. “Sweet boy, mother is here. Come out, darling. You promised! You promised you would be mine!”

The speakers crackled to life once again, and I jumped. “Executioner Dres-”

The woman on the other end was cut off by Mosely's accented, “-give me that. Dresden, I just got called in, dunno how long it'll take. You wanna wait here with Lulu and the boys in blue or ride along with me?”

I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Johansen had stopped the tape and was pocketing recorder. “What do you mean you got called in?”

“No offense, Sheriff, but I wasn't talking to you. It is strictly Executioner business.”

I picked up my staff and glanced at where Lulu was staring at the far wall of rodents in plastic cages. Her mouth twisted in a vague sense of disgust. So long as no one else started bleeding around her, I was fairly certain she wasn't going to go revenant again. Not for tonight, at least. I could still feel her heart matching pace with mine.

“I'll come.” I said and headed for the steel door across the room. “It's not like I can do anything else here.”

The duties of an Executioner were very specific. To have been called in so suddenly, the options of what Mosely was going to do were narrowed to _one_.

Kill confirmation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * My favorite Terry Pratchett/Discworld/Granny Weatherwax quote. Just so you know.


End file.
